Race and College Success: Evidence from Missouri

By Peter Arcidiacono and Cory Koedel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

Conditional on enrollment, African American students are substantially less likely to graduate from four-year public universities than white students. Using administrative micro-data from Missouri, we decompose the graduation gap into racial differences i...

Corruption Dynamics: The Golden Goose Effect

By Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

Theoretical work on disciplining corrupt agents has emphasized the role of expected future rents -- for example, efficiency wages. Yet taken seriously this approach implies that illicit future rents should also deter corruption. We study this "golden g...

How to Restore Equitable and Sustainable Economic Growth in the United States

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, May 2016

Today's weakness in the US economy results from lack of aggregate demand, due to high and growing inequality, underinvestment in public infrastructure and technology that is complementary to private capital, continuing mild austerity, difficulties encount...

A Retrospective Look at Rescuing and Restructuring General Motors and Chrysler

[Symposium: The Bailouts of 2007-2009]

By Austan D. Goolsbee and Alan B. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The rescue of the US automobile industry amid the 2008-2009 recession and financial crisis was a consequential, controversial, and difficult decision made at a fraught moment for the US economy. Both of us were involved in the decision process at the time...

Why Are Saving Rates of Urban Households in China Rising?

By Marcos D. Chamon and Eswar S. Prasad

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household savings rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to about one-quarter of disposable income. Savings rates increased across all demographic groups, and the age profile of savings has an unusual pattern in r...

The Economics of Slums in the Developing World

By Benjamin Marx, Thomas Stoker, and Tavneet Suri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

The global expansion of urban slums poses questions for economic research as well as problems for policymakers. We provide evidence that the type of poverty observed in contemporary slums of the developing world is characteristic of that described in th...

Are We Finally Winning the War on Cancer?

[Symposium: Health Care]

By David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

President Nixon declared what came to be known as the "war on cancer" in 1971 in his State of the Union address. At first the war on cancer went poorly: despite a substantial increase in resources, age-adjusted cancer mortality increased by 8 percent betw...

The Sports Business as a Labor Market Laboratory

[Symposium: Sports Economics]

By Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

With superior data on compensation and productivity, as well as the occurrence of abrupt, dramatic market structure and player allocation rules changes, sports labor markets offer an excellent setting in which to test economic hypotheses. This paper revie...

A Randomized Assessment of Online Learning

By William T. Alpert, Kenneth A. Couch, and Oskar R. Harmon

American Economic Review, May 2016

A microeconomics principles course employing random assignment across three sections with different teaching models is used to explore learning outcomes as measured by a cumulative final exam for students who participate in traditional face-to-face classr...

The Distributive Impacts of Financial Development: Evidence from Mortgage Markets during US Bank Branch Deregulation

By Ishani Tewari

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Well-functioning credit markets play a key role in boosting overall economic growth, but their impact on distributional outcomes is much less clear. I use a quasi-experimental setting provided by branch banking deregulation, an important episode of US ...

Productivity Differences across Employers: The Roles of Employer Size, Age, and Human Capital

By John C. Haltiwanger, Julia I. Lane, and James Spletzer

American Economic Review, May 1999

The Questionable Value of Having a Choice of Levels of Health Insurance Coverage

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Justin Sydnor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

In most health insurance markets in the United States, consumers have substantial choice about their health insurance plan. However additional choice is not an unmixed blessing as it creates challenges related to both consumer confusion and adverse sele...

Page Limits on Economics Articles: Evidence from Two Journals

[Symposium: Academic Production]

By David Card and Stefano DellaVigna

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

Over the past four decades the median length of the papers published in the "top five" economic journals has grown by nearly 300 percent. We study the effects of a page limit policy introduced by the American Economic Review (AER) in mid...

Are Immigrants Favorably Self-Selected?

By Barry Chiswick

American Economic Review, May 1999

Measuring Discounting without Measuring Utility

By Arthur E. Attema, Han Bleichrodt, Yu Gao, Zhenxing Huang, and Peter P. Wakker

American Economic Review, June 2016

We introduce a new method to measure the temporal discounting of money. Unlike preceding methods, our method requires neither knowledge nor measurement of utility. It is easier to implement, clearer to subjects, and requires fewer measurements than existi...

School Admissions Reform in Chicago and England: Comparing Mechanisms by Their Vulnerability to Manipulation

By Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, February 2013

In Fall 2009, Chicago authorities abandoned a school assignment mechanism midstream, citing concerns about its vulnerability to manipulation. Nonetheless, they asked thousands of applicants to re-rank schools in a new mechanism that is also manipulable...

Industrial Policy and Competition

By Philippe Aghion, Jing Cai, Mathias Dewatripont, Luosha Du, Ann Harrison, and Patrick Legros

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

Using a comprehensive dataset of all medium and large enterprises in China between 1998 and 2007, we show that industrial policies allocated to competitive sectors or that foster competition in a sector increase productivity growth. We measure competition...

A Theory of Patent Portfolios

By Jay Pil Choi and Heiko Gerlach

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

This paper develops a theory of patent portfolios in which firms accumulate an enormous amount of related patents, which makes it impractical to develop new products that avoid inadvertent infringement. We show that patent peace arises if product market c...

Classroom Games: Information Cascades

By Lisa R. Anderson and Charles A. Holt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

This paper describes how to set up a classroom exercise in which students see private signals and make public decisions in sequence. A pattern of conforming decisions in this context is called an information cascade. Once a cascade starts, it is rational ...

Missing Gains from Trade?

By Marc J. Melitz and Stephen J. Redding

American Economic Review, May 2014

In a class of trade models which satisfy a constant elasticity gravity equation, the welfare gains from trade can be computed using the open economy domestic trade share and a constant trade elasticity. The measured welfare gains from trade from this quan...