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...

The Effect of Female Education on Fertility and Infant Health: Evidence from School Entry Policies Using Exact Date of Birth

By Justin McCrary and Heather Royer

American Economic Review, February 2011

This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. ...

Technology, Employment, and the Business Cycle: Do Technology Shocks Explain Aggregate Fluctuations?

By Jordi Galí

American Economic Review, March 1999

The author estimate a decomposition of productivity and hours into technology and nontechnology components. Two results stand out: (1) the estimated conditional correlations of hours and productivity are negative for technology shocks, positive for nontec...

Mandated Risk Retention in Mortgage Securitization: An Economist's View

By Paul Willen

American Economic Review, May 2014

I evaluate the empirical premise and the economic logic of the Dodd-Frank Act's requirement that issuers of asset-backed securities retain credit risk.

Firms in International Trade

By Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Since the mid-1990s, researchers have used micro datasets to study countries' production and trade at the firm level and have found that exporting firms differ substantially from firms that solely serve the domestic market. Across a wide range of countrie...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

The Effect of Access to College Assessments on Enrollment and Attainment

By George Bulman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

This paper examines if students' college outcomes are sensitive to access to college admissions tests. I construct a dataset of every test center location and district policy in the United States linked to the universe of individual testing records and...

The Economic Crisis from a Neoclassical Perspective

[Symposium: Macroeconomics after the Financial Crisis]

By Lee E. Ohanian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

This paper assesses the 2007-2009 recession using neoclassical business cycle theory. I find that the 2007-2009 U.S. recession differs substantially from other postwar U.S. recessions, and also from the 2008 recession in other countries, in that lower lab...

Performance Pay and Productivity

By Edward P. Lazear

American Economic Review, December 2000

Much of the theory in personnel economics relates to effects of monetary incentives on output, but the theory was untested because appropriate data were unavailable. A new data set for the Safelite Glass Corporation tests the predictions that average prod...

Violent Conflict and Behavior: A Field Experiment in Burundi

By Maarten J. Voors, Eleonora E. M. Nillesen, Philip Verwimp, Erwin H. Bulte, Robert Lensink, and Daan P. Van Soest

American Economic Review, April 2012

We use a series of field experiments in rural Burundi to examine the impact of exposure to conflict on social, risk, and time preferences. We find that conflict affects behavior: individuals exposed to violence display more altruistic behavior towards the...

A Search and Matching Approach to Labor Markets: Did the Natural Rate of Unemployment Rise?

[Symposium: Labor Markets and Unemployment]

By Mary C. Daly, Bart Hobijn, Ayşegül Şahin, and Robert G. Valletta

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

The U.S. unemployment rate has remained stubbornly high since the 2007-2009 recession, leading some observers to conclude that structural rather than cyclical factors are to blame. Relying on a standard job search and matching framework and empirical evid...

Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil

By Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

We estimate the effect of television on fertility in Brazil, where soap operas portray small families. We exploit differences in the timing of entry into different markets of Globo, the main novela producer. Women living in areas covered by Globo have sig...

Corrigendum: Sex Selection and Gender Balance

By V. Bhaskar

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

Prize Structure and Information in Tournaments: Experimental Evidence

By Richard B. Freeman and Alexander M. Gelber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

This paper examines behavior in a tournament in which we vary the tournament prize structure and the available information about participants' skill at the task of solving mazes. The number of solved mazes is lowest when payments are independent of per...

Holdout in the Assembly of Complements: A Problem for Market Design

By Scott Duke Kominers and E. Glen Weyl

American Economic Review, May 2012

Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods—such as land or dispersed spectrum—from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate...

Credit Constraints and Self-Fulfilling Business Cycles

By Zheng Liu and Pengfei Wang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2014

We argue that credit constraints not only amplify fundamental shocks, they can also lead to self-fulfilling business cycles. We study a model with heterogeneous firms, in which imperfect contract enforcement implies that productive firms face binding c...