Gender Diversity on Corporate Boards: Do Women Contribute Unique Skills?

By Daehyun Kim and Laura T. Starks

American Economic Review, May 2016

We show that gender diversity in corporate boards could improve firm value because of the contributions that women make to the board. Prior studies examine valuation effects of gender-diverse boards and reach mixed conclusions. To help resolve this conund...

Foreword

By Richard Thaler

American Economic Review, May 2015

Reference-Dependent Risk Attitudes

By Botond Kőszegi and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, September 2007

We use Koszegi and Rabin's (2006) model of reference-dependent utility, and an extension of it that applies to decisions with delayed consequences, to study preferences over monetary risk. Because our theory equates the reference point with recent prob...

The Margins of Global Sourcing: Theory and Evidence from US Firms

By Pol Antràs, Teresa C. Fort, and Felix Tintelnot

American Economic Review, September 2017

We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. In contrast to canonical export models where firm profits are additively separable across destinat...

When Labor Disputes Bring Cities to a Standstill: The Impact of Public Transit Strikes on Traffic, Accidents, Air Pollution, and Health

By Stefan Bauernschuster, Timo Hener, and Helmut Rainer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Many governments have banned strikes in public transportation. Whether this can be justified depends on whether strikes endanger public safety or health. We use time-series and cross-sectional variation in powerful registry data to quantify the effects of...

Parties or Problem Sets: Review Article on How College Works and Paying for the Party

By William R. Johnson

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

The potential of Internet-enabled distance learning to transform higher education focuses attention on exactly what residential higher-education institutions do for and to their students. Two recent books marshal detailed quantitative and subjective data ...

Double/Debiased/Neyman Machine Learning of Treatment Effects

By Victor Chernozhukov, Denis Chetverikov, Mert Demirer, Esther Duflo, Christian Hansen, and Whitney Newey

American Economic Review, May 2017

Chernozhukov et al. (2016) provide a generic double/de-biased machine learning (ML) approach for obtaining valid inferential statements about focal parameters, using Neyman-orthogonal scores and cross-fitting, in settings where nuisance parameters are est...

Returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

By Christina Paxson and Cecilia Elena Rouse

American Economic Review, May 2008

Cities Are Physical Too: Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance

By Nikhil Naik, Ramesh Raskar, and César A. Hidalgo

American Economic Review, May 2016

For social scientists, developing an empirical connection between the physical appearance of a city and the behavior and health of its inhabitants has proved challenging due to a lack of data on urban appearance. Can we use computers to quantify urban app...

The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue...

Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century...

Automobile Externalities and Policies

By Ian W. H. Parry, Margaret Walls, and Winston Harrington

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2007

This paper discusses the nature, and magnitude, of externalities associated with automobile use, including local and global pollution, oil dependence, traffic congestion and traffic accidents. It then discusses current federal policies affecting these ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Moving to Opportunity or Isolation? Network Effects of a Randomized Housing Lottery in Urban India

By Sharon Barnhardt, Erica Field, and Rohini Pande

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the city's periphery. Fourteen years later, winners report improved housing but no change in tenure security, family income, or human capit...

The Surprising Incidence of Tax Credits for the Toyota Prius

By James M. Sallee

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

This paper estimates the incidence of tax incentives for the Toyota Prius. Transaction microdata indicate that both federal and state incentives were fully captured by consumers. This is surprising because Toyota faced a binding production constraint, whi...

The Computational Experiment: An Econometric Tool

[Symposium: Computational Experiments in Macroeconomics]

By Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

An economic experiment places people in an environment desired by the experimenter, who then records the time paths of their economic behavior. Performing experiments using actual people at the level of national economies is obviously impractical but cons...

Collaborating

By Alessandro Bonatti and Johannes Hörner

American Economic Review, April 2011

This paper examines moral hazard in teams over time. Agents are collectively engaged in a project whose duration and outcome are uncertain, and their individual efforts are unobserved. Free-riding leads not only to a reduction in effort, but also to procr...

Envirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for an Emerging Field

By Michael Greenstone and B. Kelsey Jack

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2015

Environmental quality in many developing countries is poor and generates substantial health and productivity costs. However, the few existing measures of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for environmental quality improvements indicate low valuations by ...

The Boundaries of the Firm Revisited

[Symposium: The Firm and its Boundaries]

By Bengt Holmstrom and John Roberts

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Both transaction cost-economics and property-rights theories offer explanations of the boundaries of the firm based on ideas of ex post bargaining and holdup. These theories are quite distinct in their empirical predictions, but neither offers a satisfact...

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

American Economic Review, July 2016

We explore the consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover the following. First, apart from the land mass and water bodies, split and non-split groups are similar across several dimensions. Second, the i...