Grade Information and Grade Inflation: The Cornell Experiment

[Symposium: Grade Differences and Inflation]

By Talia Bar, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Asaf Zussman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009

Grade inflation and high grade levels have been subjects of concern and public debate in recent decades. In the mid-1990s, Cornell University's Faculty Senate had a number of discussions about grade inflation and what might be done about it. In April 1996...

The War on Drugs: Methamphetamine, Public Health, and Crime

By Carlos Dobkin and Nancy Nicosia

American Economic Review, March 2009

In mid-1995, a government effort to reduce the supply of methamphetamine precursors successfully disrupted the methamphetamine market and interrupted a trajectory of increasing usage. The price of methamphetamine tripled and purity declined from 90 per...

Do Wealth Fluctuations Generate Time-Varying Risk Aversion? Micro-evidence on Individuals

By Markus K. Brunnermeier and Stefan Nagel

American Economic Review, June 2008

We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate how households portfolio allocations change in response to wealth fluctuations. Persistent habits, consumption commitments, and subsistence levels can generate time-varying risk aversio...

A Sociological Perspective on Gender and Career Outcomes

[Symposium: Sociology and Economics]

By Barbara F. Reskin and Denise D. Bielby

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

Powering Up China: Income Distributions and Residential Electricity Consumption

By Maximilian Auffhammer and Catherine D. Wolfram

American Economic Review, May 2014

Current forecasts suggest that the vast majority of growth in energy demand will come from the developing world, and that China will play a major part in that growth. This paper presents evidence suggesting that the shape of the income distribution, which...

Incentive Schemes, Sorting, and Behavioral Biases of Employees: Experimental Evidence

By Ian Larkin and Stephen Leider

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2012

We investigate how the convexity of a firm's incentives interacts with worker overconfidence to affect sorting decisions and performance. We demonstrate, experimentally, that overconfident employees are more likely to sort into a nonlinear incentive schem...

A Quantitative Analysis of the Used-Car Market

By Alessandro Gavazza, Alessandro Lizzeri, and Nikita Roketskiy

American Economic Review, November 2014

We quantitatively investigate the allocative and welfare effects of secondary markets for cars. An important source of gains from trade in these markets is the heterogeneity in the willingness to pay for higher-quality (newer) goods, but transaction co...

The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study

By David J. Deming, Noam Yuchtman, Amira Abulafi, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, March 2016

We study employers' perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a lar...

Medium-Term Business Cycles

By Diego Comin and Mark Gertler

American Economic Review, June 2006

Over the postwar period, many industrialized countries have experienced significant medium-frequency oscillations between periods of robust growth versus relative stagnation. Conventional business cycle filters, however, tend to sweep these oscillations...

The Limits of Trade Policy Reform in Developing Countries

[Symposium: Trade Liberalization and Development]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

Trade reform is now raising some new issues. This paper deals with three sets of questions: First, how can trade reform be sustained? Can governments convince business, labor, or consumers that trade reform will be lasting, so as to forestall possible adv...

The Latin American State

[Symposium: The State and Economic Development]

By Albert Fishlow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The role of the state in Latin American economic development is undergoing fundamental reconsideration. This essay focuses on the reasons underlying the new commitment to reduced state participation. In particular, I suggest that the impetus comes less fr...

Learning from Experience and Learning from Others: An Exploration of Learning and Spillovers in Wartime Shipbuilding

By Rebecca Achee Thornton and Peter Thompson

American Economic Review, December 2001

A new data set facilitates study of learning spillovers in World War II shipbuilding. Our results contain two principal but contrasting themes. First, learning spillovers were a significant source of productivity growth, and may have contributed more than...

Climate Change, Mortality, and Adaptation: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather in the US

By Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Using random year-to-year variation in temperature, we document the relationship between daily temperatures and annual mortality rates and daily temperatures and annual residential energy consumption. Both relationships exhibit nonlinearities, with signif...

How Food Banks Use Markets to Feed the Poor

By Canice Prendergast

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

A difficult issue for organizations is how to assign valuable resources across competing opportunities. This work describes how Feeding America allocates about 300 million pounds of food a year to over two hundred food banks across the United States. It d...

Beyond Incentive Pay: Insiders' Estimates of the Value of Complementary Human Resource Management Practices

By Casey Ichniowski and Kathryn Shaw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Do human resource management (HRM) practices, such as incentive pay, teamwork, training, and careful screening practices, raise productivity, and if so, under what conditions does productivity rise? Recently, this question has been a central focus in orga...

Micro-to-Macro Simulation: A Primer with a Labor Market Example

By Barbara R. Bergmann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

Simulation models, now widely used in the physical sciences, can also help economists in depicting the actions and interactions of individuals and firms through time. This article provides an introduction to microsimulation: how it works, how to do it, it...

The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit

By Gordon B. Dahl and Lance Lochner

American Economic Review, August 2012

Using an instrumental variables strategy, we estimate the causal effect of income on children's math and reading achievement. Our identification derives from the large, nonlinear changes in the Earned Income Tax Credit. The largest of these changes increa...

Toward a General Theory of Wage and Price Rigidities and Economic Fluctuations

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, May 1999

Does the NAIRU Have the Right Dynamics?

By Ray C. Fair

American Economic Review, May 1999

Why Do Different Wage Series Tell Different Stories?

By Katharine G. Abraham, James R. Spletzer, and Jay C. Stewart

American Economic Review, May 1999