On the Timing and Pricing of Dividends

By Jules van Binsbergen, Michael Brandt, and Ralph Koijen

American Economic Review, June 2012

We present evidence on the term structure of the equity premium. We recover prices of dividend strips, which are short-term assets that pay dividends on the stock index every period up to period T and nothing thereafter. It is short-term relative to the ...

Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors

By Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

The careers of MBAs from a top US business school are studied to understand how career dynamics differ by gender. Although male and female MBAs have nearly identical earnings at the outset of their careers, their earnings soon diverge, with the male earni...

Private Equity Premium Puzzle Revisited

By Katya Kartashova

American Economic Review, October 2014

This paper revisits the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jøgensen (2002) on returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. Following the authors' methodology and new data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that the "private equ...

Accountability in US Education: Applying Lessons from K-12 Experience to Higher Education

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By David J. Deming and David Figlio

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

A new push for accountability has become an increasingly important feature of education policy in the United States and throughout the world. Broadly speaking, accountability seeks to hold educational institutions responsible for student outcome using too...

Accountability and Information in Elections

By Scott Ashworth, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, and Amanda Friedenberg

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

Elections are thought to improve voter welfare through two channels: effective accountability (i.e., providing incentives for politicians to take costly effort) and electoral selection (i.e., retaining politicians with characteristics voters value). We ...

Market Reasoning as Moral Reasoning: Why Economists Should Re-engage with Political Philosophy

[Symposium: Economics and Moral Virtues]

By Michael J. Sandel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

In my book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012), I try to show that market values and market reasoning increasingly reach into spheres of life previously governed by nonmarket norms. I argue that this tendency is troubling; ...

Europe's Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson

American Economic Review, August 2012

During the age of mass migration (1850-1913), one of the largest migration episodes in history, the United States maintained a nearly open border, allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions. We estimate the return to migratio...

Dynamic Adverse Selection: A Theory of Illiquidity, Fire Sales, and Flight to Quality

By Veronica Guerrieri and Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, July 2014

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of asset markets with adverse selection. There exists a unique equilibrium in which better quality assets trade at higher prices but with a lower price-dividend ratio in less liquid markets. Sellers of high-quality a...

The Limits of Inference with Theory: A Review of Wolpin (2013)

By John Rust

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2014

This essay reviews Kenneth I. Wolpin's (2013) monograph The Limits of Inference without Theory, which arose from lectures he presented at the Cowles Foundation in 2010 in honor of Tjalling Koopmans. While I readily agree with Wolpin's basic premise that e...

New Challenges in Multihospital Kidney Exchange

By Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, May 2012

The growth of kidney exchange presents new challenges for the design of kidney exchange clearinghouses. The players now include directors of transplant centers, who see sets of patient-donor pairs, and can choose to reveal only difficult-to-match pairs to...

Labor Supply and Household Dynamics

By Maurizio Mazzocco, Claudia Ruiz, and Shintaro Yamaguchi

American Economic Review, May 2014

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we provide evidence that to understand household decisions and evaluate policies designed to affect individual welfare, it is important to add an intertemporal dimension to the by-now standard static collective mo...

The Great Equalizer: Health Care Access and Infant Mortality in Thailand

By Jonathan Gruber, Nathaniel Hendren, and Robert M. Townsend

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

This paper analyzes Thailand's 2001 healthcare reform, "30 Baht." The program increased funding available to hospitals to care for the poor and reduced copays to 30 Baht (~$0.75). Our estimates suggest the supply-side funding of the program increased h...

Estimating the Peace Dividend: The Impact of Violence on House Prices in Northern Ireland

By Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller

American Economic Review, April 2012

This article exploits data on the pattern of violence across regions and over time to estimate the impact of the peace process in Northern Ireland on house prices. After establishing a negative correlation between killings and house prices, we estimate th...

Do Matching Frictions Explain Unemployment? Not in Bad Times

By Pascal Michaillat

American Economic Review, June 2012

This paper proposes a search-and-matching model of unemployment in which jobs are rationed: the labor market does not clear in the absence of matching frictions. This job shortage arises in an economic equilibrium from the combination of some wage rigidit...

Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care

By Joseph J. Doyle Jr.

American Economic Review, December 2007

Little is known about the effects of placing children who are abused or neglected into foster care. This paper uses the placement tendency of child protection investigators as an instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care on long-te...

Just Enough or All: Selling a Firm

By Mehmet Ekmekci, Nenad Kos, and Rakesh Vohra

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

We consider the problem of selling a firm to a single buyer. The buyer privately knows post-sale cash flows and the benefits of control. Unlike the case where buyer's private information is one-dimensional, the optimal mechanism is a menu of tuples of cas...

Financial Stability, the Trilemma, and International Reserves

By Maurice Obstfeld, Jay C. Shambaugh, and Alan M. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

The rapid growth of international reserves, a development concentrated in the emerging markets, remains a puzzle. In this paper, we suggest that a model based on financial stability and financial openness goes far toward explaining reserve holdings in ...

Getting beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City

By Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

In this paper, we collect data on the inner-workings of 39 charter schools and correlate these data with school effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input measures -- class size, per-pupil expenditure, teacher certification, and teacher ...

Cyclical Variation in Labor Hours and Productivity Using the ATUS

By Michael C. Burda, Daniel S. Hamermesh, and Jay Stewart

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data from 2003 to 2010. The data sources include the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both...

Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration

By Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson

American Economic Review, April 2016

The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large ...