How Departments of Economics Evaluate Teaching

By William E. Becker and Michael Watts

American Economic Review, May 1999

On the Complexities of Complex Economic Dynamics

By J. Barkley Rosser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

Complex economic nonlinear dynamics endogenously do not converge to a point, a limit cycle, or an explosion. Their study developed out of earlier studies of cybernetic, catastrophic, and chaotic systems. Complexity analysis stresses interactions among dis...

Persistence and Change in Culture and Institutions under Autarchy, Trade, and Factor Mobility

By Marianna Belloc and Samuel Bowles

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

Differences among nations in culture (preferences including social norms) and institutions (contracts) may result in specialization and gains from trade even in the absence of exogenous differences in factor endowments or technologies. Goods differ in t...

Same Song, Same Refrain? Economic Sanctions in the 1990's

By Kimberly Ann Elliott and Gary Clyde Hufbauer

American Economic Review, May 1999

The 'Out of Africa' Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development

By Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

American Economic Review, February 2013

This research advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the prehistoric exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has ha...

The Impact of Immigration: Why Do Studies Reach Such Different Results?

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Christian Dustmann, Uta Schönberg, and Jan Stuhler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

We classify the empirical literature on the wage impact of immigration into three groups, where studies in the first two groups estimate different relative effects, and studies in the third group estimate the total effect of immigration on wages. We inter...

Farewell to Notes

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Search Design and Broad Matching

By Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler

American Economic Review, March 2016

We study decentralized mechanisms for allocating firms into search pools. The pools are created in response to noisy preference signals provided by consumers, who then browse the pools via costly random sequential search. Surplus-maximizing search pool...

A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade: Comment

By Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro, and Ignatius J. Horstmann

American Economic Review, March 2016

We show that the Armenter and Koren model's firm-product-country results rely on the assumption that export shipment size is independent of firm size, and this assumption is contradicted by the data. When actual shipment sizes are used in the balls-and-...

Can Expected Utility Theory Explain Gambling?

By Roger Hartley and Lisa Farrell

American Economic Review, June 2002

We investigate the ability of expected utility theory to account for simultaneous gambling and insurance. Contrary to a previous claim that borrowing and lending in perfect capital markets removes the demand for gambles, we show expected utility theory wi...

Motherhood and Female Labor Force Participation: Evidence from Infertility Shocks

By Jorge M. Aguero and Mindy S. Marks

American Economic Review, May 2008

"Personal Influence": Social Context and Political Competition

By Andrea Galeotti and Andrea Mattozzi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2011

This paper studies the effect of social learning on political outcomes in a model of informative campaign advertising. Voters' communication network affects parties' incentives to disclose political information, voters' learning about candidates running ...

How Far Will International Economic Integration Go?

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of the Economy]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

This article speculates about the future of the world economy 100 years from now. It argues that the spread of markets is restricted by the reach of jurisdictional boundaries, and that national sovereignty imposes serious constraints on international econ...

How Debt Markets Have Malfunctioned in the Crisis

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Arvind Krishnamurthy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

The financial crisis that began in 2007 is especially a crisis in debt markets. A full understanding of what happened in the financial crisis requires investigation into the plumbing of debt markets. During a financial crisis, when funds often cannot be r...

Early Admissions at Selective Colleges

By Christopher Avery and Jonathan Levin

American Economic Review, December 2010

Early admissions are widely used by selective colleges and universities. We identify some basic facts about early admissions policies, including the admissions advantage enjoyed by early applicants and patterns in application behavior, and propose a game-...

Policy Watch: Debt Relief

By Serkan Arslanalp and Peter Blair Henry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

At the Gleneagles summit in July 2005, the heads of state from the G-8 countries—the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom—called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the African De...

Detecting Bidders Groups in Collusive Auctions

By Timothy G. Conley and Francesco Decarolis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

We study entry and bidding in procurement auctions where contracts are awarded to the bid closest to a trimmed average bid. These auctions, common in public procurement, create incentives to coordinate bids to manipulate the bid distribution. We presen...

The Effect of Wealth on Individual and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from Swedish Lotteries

By David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, and Robert Östling

American Economic Review, December 2017

We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. Winning a lottery prize modestly reduces earnings, with the reduction being immediate, persistent, and quite sim...

Do We Really Know That the WTO Increases Trade? Comment

By Michael Tomz, Judith L. Goldstein, and Douglas Rivers

American Economic Review, December 2007

Convergence in Macroeconomics: The Labor Wedge

By Robert Shimer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

I review research on the behavior of the labor wedge, the ratio between the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure and the marginal product of labor. According to competitive, market-clearing macroeconomic models, the ratio is easy to...