Finance and Development: A Tale of Two Sectors

By Francisco J. Buera, Joseph P. Kaboski, and Yongseok Shin

American Economic Review, August 2011

We develop a quantitative framework to explain the relationship between aggregate/sector-level total factor productivity (TFP) and financial development across countries. Financial frictions distort the allocation of capital and entrepreneurial talent acr...

US State Fiscal Policy and Natural Resources

By Alexander James

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

An analytical framework predicts that, in response to an exogenous increase in resource-based government revenue, a benevolent government will partially substitute away from taxing income, increase spending and save. Fifty-one years of US-state level data...

Exchange Rate Predictability

By Barbara Rossi

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2013

The main goal of this article is to provide an answer to the question: does anything forecast exchange rates, and if so, which variables? It is well known that exchange rate fluctuations are very difficult to predict using economic models, and that a r...

Has the US Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation

By Thomas Philippon

American Economic Review, April 2015

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again aft...

How Is Tax Policy Conducted over the Business Cycle?

By Carlos A. Vegh and Guillermo Vuletin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

It is well known by now that government spending has typically been procyclical in developing economies but acyclical or countercyclical in industrial countries. Little, if any, is known, however, about the cyclical behavior of tax rates (as opposed to ta...

A Quantitative Review of Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family by Carbone and Cahn

By Kirsten Cornelson and Aloysius Siow

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

June Carbone and Naomi Cahn argue that growing earnings inequality and the increased educational attainment of women, relative to men, have led to declining marriage rates for less-educated women and an increase in positive assortative matching since the ...

Multiple Dimensions of Private Information: Evidence from the Long-Term Care Insurance Market

By Amy Finkelstein and Kathleen McGarry

American Economic Review, September 2006

We demonstrate the existence of multiple dimensions of private information in the long-term care insurance market. Two types of people purchase insurance: individuals with private information that they are high risk and individuals with private informa...

Under the Weather: Health, Schooling, and Economic Consequences of Early-Life Rainfall

By Sharon Maccini and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, June 2009

We examine the effect of early-life rainfall on the health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes of Indonesian adults. We link historical rainfall for each individual's birth year and birth location with adult outcomes from the 2000 Indonesia Family Life...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Retrospectives: On the Definition of Economics

By Roger E. Backhouse and Steven G. Medema

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

Modern economists do not subscribe to a homogeneous definition of their subject. Surveying definitions of economics from contemporary principles of economics textbooks, we find that economics is the study of the economy, the study of the coordination proc...

Impatience and Uncertainty: Experimental Decisions Predict Adolescents' Field Behavior

By Matthias Sutter, Martin G. Kocher, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler, and Stefan T. Trautmann

American Economic Review, February 2013

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment and relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found ...

Schooling and Labor Market Consequences of School Construction in Indonesia: Evidence from an Unusual Policy Experiment

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, September 2001

Between 1973 and 1978, the Indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record. Combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the p...

The Industrial Organization of Online Education

By Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

American Economic Review, May 2014

Online education has flexibility and cost advantages over in-class teaching and these advantages will grow with improvements in information technology. We consider likely market structures given that the quality aspects of online education exhibit endogen...

Machiavellian Privatization

By Bruno Biais and Enrico Perotti

American Economic Review, March 2002

We analyze politically motivated privatization in a bipartisan environment. When median-class voters a priori favor redistributive policies, a strategic privatization program allocating them enough shares can induce a voting shift away from left-wing part...

Demand Estimation under Incomplete Product Availability

By Christopher T. Conlon and Julie Holland Mortimer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2013

Incomplete product availability is an important feature of many markets, and ignoring changes in availability may bias demand estimates. We study a new dataset from a wireless inventory system on vending machines to track product availability every fou...

Why Are Target Interest Rate Changes So Persistent?

By Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

While the degree of policy inertia in central banks' reaction functions is a central ingredient in theoretical and empirical monetary economics, the source of the observed policy inertia in the United States is controversial, with tests of competing hypo...

Global Imbalances and Financial Fragility

By Ricardo J. Caballero and Arvind Krishnamurthy

American Economic Review, May 2009