Black-White Earnings Differentials: Privatization versus Deregulation

By James Peoples and Wayne K. Talley

American Economic Review, May 2001

Climate Treaties and "Breakthrough" Technologies

By Scott Barrett

American Economic Review, May 2006

Excess Male Infant Mortality: The Gene-Institution Interactions

By Roland Pongou, Barthelemy Kuate Defo, and Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

American Economic Review, May 2017

Excess male mortality at early ages is an important source of child inequality in most societies. We examine how improvement in the quality of political institutions affects the male survival disadvantage. Using data on twins in combination with a natural...

Prospect Theory as Efficient Perceptual Distortion

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, May 2012

The paper proposes a theory of efficient perceptual distortions, in which the statistical relation between subjective perceptions and the objective state minimizes the error of the state estimate, subject to a constraint on information processing capacity...

Zipf's Law, Pareto's Law, and the Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States

By Shuhei Aoki and Makoto Nirei

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

We construct a tractable neoclassical growth model that generates Pareto's law of income distribution and Zipf's law of the firm size distribution from idiosyncratic, firm-level productivity shocks. Executives and entrepreneurs invest in risk-free assets,...

A Preanalysis Plan to Replicate Sixty Economics Research Papers That Worked Half of the Time

By Andrew C. Chang and Phillip Li

American Economic Review, May 2017

We attempted to replicate 67 macroeconomic papers using author-provided data and code files by following a preanalysis plan. Excluding 6 papers that used confidential data, we obtained data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83 percent) that ...

Offshoring and Directed Technical Change

By Daron Acemoglu, Gino Gancia, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

We study the implications of offshoring on innovation, technology, and wage inequality in a Ricardian model with directed technical change. Profit maximization determines both the extent of offshoring and the direction of technological progress. A fall in...

Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy

By Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, August 2011

This study presents a framework to include environmental externalities into a system of national accounts. The paper estimates the air pollution damages for each industry in the United States. An integrated-assessment model quantifies the marginal damages...

Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on Female Musicians

By Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse

American Economic Review, September 2000

A change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras--adoption of "blind" auditions with a "screen" to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury--provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, in an individual fixed-ef...

MM--Past, Present, Future

By Franco Modigliani

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

[This is a comment on "The Modigliani-Miller Propositions after Thirty Years" by Merton H. Miller in this same issue.] Before getting serious about the MM theorem's past and future, I would like to say a few words about its more personal history, includin...

Eponymous Entrepreneurs

By Sharon Belenzon, Aaron K. Chatterji, and Brendan Daley

American Economic Review, June 2017

We demonstrate that eponymy—firms being named after their owners—is linked to superior firm performance, but is relatively uncommon (about 19 percent of firms in our data). We propose an explanation based on eponymy creating an association bet...

The Economist in Tort Litigation

[Symposium: Economists as Expert Witnesses]

By Robert Thornton and John Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

In recent decades, the involvement of economists as consultants and expert witnesses in civil tort actions has grown rapidly. In this article, the authors discuss the reasons for this phenomenon and the extent to conflicts of interest to arise in the prac...

Policy Watch: U.S. Economic Policy toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

By Susan M. Collins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

As the Soviet Union and the countries in Eastern Europe take steps towards market economies and democratic political systems, the U.S. and other western countries have been confronted by a range of difficult and important questions about the appropriate e...

Economic FAQs About the Internet

[Symposium: Internet]

By Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Hal Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

This is a set for frequently asked questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet. The authors describe the current state of the Internet, discuss some of the pressing economic and regulatory problem...

Trends in the Publication of Empirical Economics

By David Figlio

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

This paper documents recent trends in the publication of empirical articles in general-interest economics journals. Three measures of journal quality are estimated. The author finds substantial differences in publication rates of empirical articles among ...

Barriers to Investment in Polarized Societies

By Marina Azzimonti

American Economic Review, August 2011

I present a tractable dynamic model of political economy where disagreements about the composition of public spending result in implementation of short-sighted policies. Excessive taxation reduces the return to physical capital and hence investment rates,...

Trade Flow Dynamics with Heterogeneous Firms

By Fabio Ghironi and Marc J. Melitz

American Economic Review, May 2007

Does the Federal Reserve Care about the Rest of the World?

[Symposium: The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve]

By Barry Eichengreen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Many economists are accustomed to thinking about Federal Reserve policy in terms of the institution's "dual mandate," which refers to price stability and high employment, and in which the exchange rate and other international variables matter only insof...

Death by Market Power: Reform, Competition, and Patient Outcomes in the National Health Service

By Martin Gaynor, Rodrigo Moreno-Serra, and Carol Propper

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from nonexperimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a procompetitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact ...

Identifying Preferences under Risk from Discrete Choices

By Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Amit Gandhi, Bernard Salanie, and Francois Salanie

American Economic Review, May 2009