Growth Dynamics: The Myth of Economic Recovery: Comment

By Hannes Mueller

American Economic Review, December 2012

This comment highlights different ways of coding crisis episodes in Cerra and Saxena (2008) (CS). The comment shows that the coding used for civil war implies a misrepresentation of its impact. A correct coding of civil war reveals that the average civil ...

Point Shaving: Corruption in NCAA Basketball

By Justin Wolfers

American Economic Review, May 2006

Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility within Developed Nations

[Symposium: Investment in Children]

By James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, and Ariel Dora Stern

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

We seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high-income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household, particularly with regards to child care and home p...

Claim Validation

By Nabil Al-Najjar, Luciano Pomatto, and Alvaro Sandroni

American Economic Review, November 2014

Hume (1748) challenged the idea that a general claim (e.g. "all swans are white") can be validated by empirical evidence, no matter how compelling. We examine this issue from the perspective of a tester who must accept or reject the forecasts of a potent...

Follow the Leader: Theory and Evidence on Political Participation

By Ron Shachar and Barry Nalebuff

American Economic Review, June 1999

Using state-by-state voting data for U.S. presidential elections, the authors observe that voter turnout is a positive function of predicted closeness. To explain the strategic component of political participation, they develop a follow-the-leader model. ...

Economic Measurement: Progress and Challenges

By Michael J. Boskin

American Economic Review, May 2000

Does the Academic Labor Market Initially Allocate New Graduates Efficiently?

[Symposium: The Market for Economists]

By Valérie Smeets, Frédéric Warzynski, and Tom Coupé

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

It is not surprising that economics graduate students from elite and very good schools find better jobs after completion of their Ph.D. degree, on average, than do candidates from less prestigious universities. Yet the job market outcome for candidates fr...

Risk Aversion and the Labor Margin in Dynamic Equilibrium Models

By Eric T. Swanson

American Economic Review, June 2012

The household's labor margin has a substantial effect on risk aversion, and hence asset prices, in dynamic equilibrium models even when utility is additively separable between consumption and labor. This paper derives simple, closed-form expressions for r...

Peer-Induced Fairness in Games

By Teck-Hua Ho and Xuanming Su

American Economic Review, December 2009

People exhibit peer-induced fairness concerns when they look to their peers as a reference to evaluate their endowments. We analyze two independent ultimatum games played sequentially by a leader and two followers. With peer-induced fairness, the secon...

Do Traditional Institutions Constrain Female Entrepreneurship? A Field Experiment on Business Training in India

By Erica Field, Seema Jayachandran, and Rohini Pande

American Economic Review, May 2010

Gresham's Law of Model Averaging

By In-Koo Cho and Kenneth Kasa

American Economic Review, November 2017

A decision maker doubts the stationarity of his environment. In response, he uses two models, one with time-varying parameters, and another with constant parameters. Forecasts are then based on a Bayesian model averaging strategy, which mixes forecasts ...

Housing Supply Elasticity and Rent Extraction by State and Local Governments

By Rebecca Diamond

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects benefiting special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies increase governments' abilities to extract rents. Ine...

The Divergence of Legal Procedures

By Aron Balas, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009

Simeon Djankov et al. (2003) introduce a measure of the quality of contract enforcement -- the formalism of civil procedure -- for 109 countries as of 2000. For 40 of these countries, we compute procedural formalism every year since 1950. We find that ...

The Economics of Casino Gambling

By William R. Eadington

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

America's casino industry expanded rapidly in the 1990s, spreading from Nevada and Atlantic City to mining towns, riverboats, race tracks and tribal lands, and moving from isolated resort settings to urban and suburban venues. This article examines econom...

International Shock Transmission after the Lehman Brothers Collapse: Evidence from Syndicated Lending

By Ralph De Haas and Neeltje Van Horen

American Economic Review, May 2012

After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, cross-border bank lending contracted sharply. To explain the severity and variation in this contraction, we analyze detailed data on cross-border syndicated lending by 75 banks to 59 countries....

Interest Elasticity in a Life-Cycle Model with Precautionary Savings

By Marco Cagetti

American Economic Review, May 2001

Inequality at Work: The Effect of Peer Salaries on Job Satisfaction

By David Card, Alexandre Mas, Enrico Moretti, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Review, October 2012

We study the effect of disclosing information on peers' salaries on workers' job satisfaction and job search intentions. A randomly chosen subset of University of California employees was informed about a new website listing the pay of University employee...

A Comment on the Economics of Labor Adjustment: Mind the Gap: Evidence from a Monte Carlo Experiment: Reply

By Russell Cooper and Jonathan L. Willis

American Economic Review, December 2009

This note responds to Christian Bayer (2009). Cooper and Willis (2004), hereafter CW, find the aggregate nonlinearities reported in Ricardo Caballero and Eduardo Engel (1993) and Caballero, Engel, and John Haltiwanger (1997) reflect mismeasurement of the ...

Analysis of Democratic Institutions: Structure, Conduct and Performance

[Symposium: Economics of Voting]

By Roger B. Myerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1995

This paper develops an economic perspective on political theory as a guide to some problems and directions of current research. The electoral system and the allocation of powers to elected offices together define the game that politicians play. So democra...

Vignettes and Self-Reports of Work Disability in the United States and the Netherlands

By Arie Kapteyn, James P. Smith, and Arthur van Soest

American Economic Review, March 2007

In contrast to the believed similarity in their health outcomes, workers in different Western countries report very different rates of work disability. Using new data from the United States and the Netherlands, we offer a partial resolution to this parado...