The Ongoing Evolution of US Retail: A Format Tug-of-War

[Symposium: The Future of Retail]

By Ali Hortaçsu and Chad Syverson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

The past 15-20 years have seen substantial and visible changes in the way US retail business is conducted. Explanations about what is happening in the retail sector have been dominated by two powerful and not fully consistent narratives: a predictio...

Insuring Long-Term Care in the United States

[Symposium: After Retirement]

By Jeffrey R. Brown and Amy Finkelstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Long-term care expenditures constitute one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly in the United States and thus play a central role in determining the retirement security of elderly Americans. In this essay, we begin by providing some...

Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya

By Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries? To shed light on this question, we randomized access to noninterest-bearing bank accounts among two types of self-employed individuals in rural Kenya: market vendors...

The Geography of Medicare

By David M. Cutler and Louise Sheiner

American Economic Review, May 1999

Silver Signals: Twenty-Five Years of Screening and Signaling

By John G. Riley

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2001

The theory of market signaling and screening is a cornerstone of the new economics of information. The last two and a half decades have not only witnessed a series of remarkable theoretical developments but also a wide range of applications. This essay ex...

Wall Street and the Housing Bubble

By Ing-Haw Cheng, Sahil Raina, and Wei Xiong

American Economic Review, September 2014

We analyze whether mid-level managers in securitized finance were aware of a large-scale housing bubble and a looming crisis in 2004-2006 using their personal home transaction data. We find that the average person in our sample neither timed the market no...

How Sharing Information Can Garble Experts' Advice

By Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, and Andrei Kirilenko

American Economic Review, May 2014

We model the strategic provision of advice in environments where a principal's optimal action depends on an unobserved, binary state of interest. Experts receive signals about the state and each recommends an action. The principal and all experts dislike ...

FDICIA after Five Years

By George J. Benston and George G. Kaufman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

At year-end 1991, Congress enacted fundamental deposit insurance reform for banks and thrifts--the FDIC Improvement Act. This reform followed the failure of more than 2,000 depository institutions in the 1980s. Many failed because the incentive incompatib...

The State of Applied Econometrics: Causality and Policy Evaluation

[Symposium: Recent Ideas in Econometrics]

By Susan Athey and Guido W. Imbens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

In this paper, we discuss recent developments in econometrics that we view as important for empirical researchers working on policy evaluation questions. We focus on three main areas, in each case, highlighting recommendations for applied work. First, we ...

When Discounts Raise Costs: The Effect of Copay Coupons on Generic Utilization

By Leemore Dafny, Christopher Ody, and Matt Schmitt

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

Branded pharmaceutical manufacturers frequently offer "copay coupons" that insulate consumers from cost-sharing, thereby undermining insurers' ability to influence drug utilization. We study the impact of copay coupons on branded drugs first facing generi...

Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics

By Robert A. Baade and Victor A. Matheson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this paper, we explore the costs and benefits of hosting the Olympic Games. On the cost side, there are three major categories: general infrastructure such as transportation and housing to accommodate athletes and fans; specific sports infrastructure r...

Identification and Asymptotic Approximations: Three Examples of Progress in Econometric Theory

[Symposium: Recent Ideas in Econometrics]

By James L. Powell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

In empirical economics, the size and quality of datasets and computational power has grown substantially, along with the size and complexity of the econometric models and the population parameters of interest. With more and better data, it is natural to...

Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: What Central Bankers Could Learn from Academics--And Vice Versa

By Alan S. Blinder

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Academic writing about monetary policy has been useful to practical central bankers, but more of (certain aspects of) the economists' way of thinking could profitably be imported. On the other hand, academics could improve their analysis, and make it more...

Theory, Experiment and Economics

By Vernon L. Smith

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

It is now over thirty years since research was initiated in the laboratory experimental study of market behavior and performance. This essay provides my interpretation of what the implications of this type of work are for the study of economics.

Citizenship, Fertility, and Parental Investments

By Ciro Avitabile, Irma Clots-Figueras, and Paolo Masella

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Citizenship rights are associated with better economic opportunities for immigrants. This paper studies how in a country with a large fraction of temporary migrants the fertility decisions of foreign citizens respond to a change in the rules that regul...

The Gender Wage Gap and Domestic Violence

By Anna Aizer

American Economic Review, September 2010

Three quarters of all violence against women is perpetrated by domestic partners. This study exploits exogenous changes in the demand for labor in female-dominated industries to estimate the impact of the male-female wage gap on domestic violence. Decreas...

The Dynamic Behavior of the Real Exchange Rate in Sticky Price Models: Comment

By Jens Iversen and Ulf Söderström

American Economic Review, March 2014

In an article published in the American Economic Review, Jón Steinsson (2008) argues that two sticky price models driven by real shocks can explain the observed persistence, volatility and hump-shaped impulse response function of the real exchange rate....

Replication in Labor Economics: Evidence from Data, and What It Suggests

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

American Economic Review, May 2017

Examining the most heavily cited publications in labor economics from the early 1990s, I show that few of over 3,000 articles, citing them directly, replicates them. They are replicated more frequently using data from other time periods and economies, so ...

Bank Runs and Institutions: The Perils of Intervention

By Huberto M. Ennis and Todd Keister

American Economic Review, September 2009

We study ex post efficient policy responses to a run on the banking system and the ex ante incentives these responses create. We show that the efficient response to a run is typically not to freeze all remaining deposits, since doing so imposes heavy cost...

STEM Training and Early Career Outcomes of Female and Male Graduate Students: Evidence from UMETRICS Data Linked to the 2010 Census

By Catherine Buffington, Benjamin Cerf, Christina Jones, and Bruce A. Weinberg

American Economic Review, May 2016

Women are underrepresented in science and engineering, with the underrepresentation increasing in career stage. We analyze gender differences at critical junctures in the STEM pathway--graduate training and the early career--using UMETRICS administrative ...