Generational Aspects of Medicare

By David M. Cutler and Louise Sheiner

American Economic Review, May 2000

Variable Trends in Economic Time Series

By James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

The two most striking historical features of aggregate output are its sustained long run growth and its recurrent fluctuations around this growth path. Over horizons of a few years, these shorter cyclical swings can be pronounced; for example, the 1953, 1...

Making Famine History

By Cormac Ó Gráda

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2007

This paper reviews recent contributions to the economics and economic history of famine. It provides a context for the history of famine in the twentieth century, which is unique. During the century, war and totalitarianism produced more famine deaths ...

Inflation-Gap Persistence in the US

By Timothy Cogley, Giorgio E. Primiceri, and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

We estimate vector autoregressions with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatility to investigate whether US inflation persistence has changed. We focus on the inflation gap, defined as the difference between inflation and trend inflation, and we mea...

Static and Intertemporal Household Decisions

By Pierre-Andre Chiappori and Maurizio Mazzocco

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

We discuss the most popular static and dynamic models of household behavior. Our main objective is to explain which aspects of household decisions different models can account for. Using this insight, we describe testable implications, identification resu...

Fatal Attraction: Salience, Naïveté, and Sophistication in Experimental "Hide-and-Seek" Games

By Vincent P. Crawford and Nagore Iriberri

American Economic Review, December 2007

"Hide-and-seek" games are zero-sum two-person games in which one player wins by matching the other's decision and the other wins by mismatching. Although such games are often played on cultural or geographic "landscapes" that frame decisions nonneutral...

Understanding African Poverty over the Longue Durée: A Review of Africa's Development in Historical Perspective

By Margaret McMillan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

The sixteen essays edited and synthesized by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson contribute significantly to our understanding of the following questions: (1) When did Africa become poor? (2) Why did Africa become poor...

Does Public Assistance Reduce Recidivism?

By Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Review, May 2017

Under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, individuals convicted of drug-related felonies were permanently banned from receiving welfare and food stamps. Since then, over 30 states have opted out of the fed...

Shale Gas Development and Drinking Water Quality

By Elaine Hill and Lala Ma

American Economic Review, May 2017

Recent studies have linked shale gas development (SGD) to ground water contamination. The extent of these environmental externalities, to date, remains uncertain. To address this gap, we examine whether shale gas development systematically affects drinkin...

The Role of Marriage in Fighting HIV: A Quantitative Illustration for Malawi

By Jeremy Greenwood, Philipp Kircher, Cezar Santos, and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Review, May 2017

How might policies that promote marriage and/or dissuade divorce help in the fight against HIV/AIDS? This question is addressed employing a choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model, using Malawi as a case study. In the framework developed, indivi...

Sticking with Your Vote: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting for a candidate leads to a more favorable opinion of the candidate in the future. We find support for the empirical relevance of cognitive dissonance to political attitudes. We examine the pr...

Early-Life Malaria Exposure and Adult Outcomes: Evidence from Malaria Eradication in India

By David Cutler, Winnie Fung, Michael Kremer, Monica Singhal, and Tom Vogl

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We examine the effects of exposure to malaria in early childhood on educational attainment and economic status in adulthood by exploiting geographic variation in malaria prevalence in India prior to a nationwide eradication program in the 1950s. We fin...

Credit Supply and Monetary Policy: Identifying the Bank Balance-Sheet Channel with Loan Applications

By Gabriel Jiménez, Steven Ongena, José-Luis Peydró, and Jesús Saurina

American Economic Review, August 2012

We analyze the impact of monetary policy on the supply of bank credit. Monetary policy affects both loan supply and demand, thus making identification a steep challenge. We therefore analyze a novel, supervisory dataset with loan applications from Spain. ...

Population and Economic Growth

By Gary S. Becker, Edward L. Glaeser, and Kevin M. Murphy

American Economic Review, May 1999

How Liable Should a Lender Be? The Case of Judgment-Proof Firms and Environmental Risk: Comment

By Dieter Balkenborg

American Economic Review, June 2001

Street Prostitution Zones and Crime

By Paul Bisschop, Stephen Kastoryano, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

This paper studies the effects of legal street prostitution zones on registered and perceived crime. We exploit a unique setting in the Netherlands where these tippelzones were opened in nine cities under different regulation systems. Our difference-in-di...

Unplanned Purchases and Retail Competition

By Justin P. Johnson

American Economic Review, March 2017

I propose a framework in which asymmetric multiproduct retailers compete for one-stop shoppers who have biased beliefs about their future purchase probabilities (and so make unplanned purchases). One firm carries a full portfolio of products while the oth...

Medicare Part D: Are Insurers Gaming the Low Income Subsidy Design?

By Francesco Decarolis

American Economic Review, April 2015

This paper shows how in Medicare Part D insurers' gaming of the subsidy paid to low-income enrollees distorts premiums and raises the program cost. Using plan-level data from the first five years of the program, I find multiple instances of pricing strate...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

War and Institutions: New Evidence from Sierra Leone

By John Bellows and Edward Miguel

American Economic Review, May 2006