Information Asymmetries in Consumer Credit Markets: Evidence from Payday Lending

By Will Dobbie and Paige Marta Skiba

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Information asymmetries are prominent in theory but difficult to estimate. This paper exploits discontinuities in loan eligibility to test for moral hazard and adverse selection in the payday loan market. Regression discontinuity and regression kink ap...

A Review Essay on Alvin Roth's Who Gets What—And Why

By Edward L. Glaeser

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Alvin Roth's Who Gets What—And Why provides a richly accessible introduction to his pioneering work on market design. Much of economics ignores the institutions that allocate goods, blithely assuming that the mythical Walrasian auctioneer wil...

Taxes and Employment Subsidies in Optimal Redistribution Programs

By Paul Beaudry, Charles Blackorby, and Dezsö Szalay

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper explores how to optimally set taxes and transfers when taxation authorities are uninformed about individuals' value of time in both market and nonmarket activities; and can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. ...

Wine Retail Price Dispersion in the United States: Searching for Expensive Wines?

By David A. Jaeger and Karl Storchmann

American Economic Review, May 2011

Similar to other markets in which deviations from Jevons' "law of one price" is the norm rather than the exception, the retail wine market in the United States is characterized by large price dispersions. Drawing on a large sample of retail prices from wi...

In Defense of Inequality

By Finis Welch

American Economic Review, May 1999

Business Ascendancy and Economic Impasse: A Structural Retrospective on Conservative Economics, 1979-87

By Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

Conservatives have been waging economic revolution since the late Carter years. Have they succeeded? Ronald Reagan and the early architects sought their place in the history books as institutional innovators, not economic tinkerers. Viewed in this perspec...

Poverty and Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from Changes in Financial Resources at Payday

By Leandro S. Carvalho, Stephan Meier, and Stephanie W. Wang

American Economic Review, February 2016

We study the effect of financial resources on decision-making. Low-income US households are randomly assigned to receive an online survey before or after payday. The survey collects measures of cognitive function and administers risk and intertemporal cho...

The Origins of Ethnolinguistic Diversity

By Stelios Michalopoulos

American Economic Review, June 2012

This study explores the determinants of ethnolinguistic diversity within as well as across countries, shedding light on its geographic origins. The empirical analysis conducted across countries, virtual countries, and pairs of contiguous regions establish...

A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade

By Roc Armenter and Miklós Koren

American Economic Review, July 2014

Many of the facts about the extensive margin of trade—which firms export, and how many products are sent to how many destinations—are consistent with a surprisingly large class of trade models because of the sparse nature of trade data. We pro...

An Individual Health Plan Exchange: Which Employees Would Benefit and Why?

By Leemore Dafny, Katherine Ho, and Mauricio Varela

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Political Economy of the US Mortgage Default Crisis

By Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Francesco Trebbi

American Economic Review, December 2010

We examine the effects of constituents, special interests, and ideology on congressional voting on two of the most significant pieces of legislation in US economic history. Representatives whose constituents experience a sharp increase in mortgage defaul...

Explaining Job Polarization: Routine-Biased Technological Change and Offshoring

By Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons

American Economic Review, August 2014

This paper documents the pervasiveness of job polarization in 16 Western European countries over the period 1993-2010. It then develops and estimates a framework to explain job polarization using routine-biased technological change and offshoring. This mo...

Optimal Exercise Prices for Executive Stock Options

By Brian J. Hall and Kevin J. Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2000

It's Better Being an Economist (But Don't Tell Anyone).

By Richard B. Freeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

This paper contrasts the job market in economics with the job market in physics and mathematics, which attract students who are, by conventional measures, smarter than economists and where the base of knowledge is better established than ours. Despite thi...

Some Macroeconomics for the 21st Century

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of Economics]

By Robert E. Lucas

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

This note describes a numerical simulation of a model of economic growth, a simplified version of Robert Tamura's (1996) model of world income dynamics, based on technology diffusion. The model makes predictions for trends in average world income growth a...

The Effect of Uncertainty on Investment: Evidence from Texas Oil Drilling

By Ryan Kellogg

American Economic Review, June 2014

This paper estimates the response of investment to changes in uncertainty using data on oil drilling in Texas and the expected volatility of the future price of oil. Using a dynamic model of firms' investment problem, I find that: (1) the response of dril...

The Great Recession in the Shadow of the Great Depression: A Review Essay on Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses and Misuses of History, by Barry Eichengreen

By Lee E. Ohanian

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

This essay compares the Great Depression to the Great Recession in light of Barry Eichengreen's new book Hall of Mirrors. Eichengreen discusses these two episodes from a historical, Keynesian perspective, and concludes that policies that increase a...

Discounts as a Barrier to Entry

By Enrique Ide, Juan-Pablo Montero, and Nicolás Figueroa

American Economic Review, July 2016

To what extent can an incumbent manufacturer use discount contracts to foreclose efficient entry? We show that off-list-price rebates that do not commit buyers to unconditional transfers--like the rebates in EU Commission v. Michelin II, for instance--can...

Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation

By Dina Mayzlin, Yaniv Dover, and Judith Chevalier

American Economic Review, August 2014

Firms' incentives to manufacture biased user reviews impede review usefulness. We examine the differences in reviews for a given hotel between two sites: Expedia.com (only a customer can post a review) and TripAdvisor.com (anyone can post). We argue that ...

Government Policy for a Partially Deregulated Industry: Deregulate It Fully

By Clifford Winston

American Economic Review, May 2012

Alfred Kahn was a major force behind regulatory reform that initially benefited air travelers and subsequently consumers in other industries by placing greater reliance on markets than on regulators to allocate resources. Kahn also believed that effective...