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

Scale of Local Production and City Size

By Thomas J. Holmes

American Economic Review, May 1999

The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities

By Gilles Duranton and Matthew A. Turner

American Economic Review, October 2011

We investigate the effect of lane kilometers of roads on vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) in US cities. VKT increases proportionately to roadway lane kilometers for interstate highways and probably slightly less rapidly for other types of roads. The sour...

Individual Preferences, Monetary Gambles, and Stock Market Participation: A Case for Narrow Framing

By Nicholas Barberis, Ming Huang, and Richard H. Thaler

American Economic Review, September 2006

We argue that “narrow framing,” whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation, may be a more important feature of decisionmaking than previously realized. Our starting point is the evidence that people are often aver...

U.S. Abortion Policy and Fertility

By Jacob Alex Klerman

American Economic Review, May 1999

What Can We Expect from Community-Based Lending for the District of Columbia

By Gwendolyn Flowers

American Economic Review, May 1999