Consumption and Income Inequality and the Great Recession

By Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine changes in consumption and income inequality between 2000 and 2011. During the most recent recession, unemployment rose and asset values declined sharply. We investigate how the recession affected inequality while addressing concerns about unde...

The Limited Influence of Unemployment on the Wage Bargain

By Robert E. Hall and Paul R. Milgrom

American Economic Review, September 2008

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective joint surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may have limited influence. The job-seeker's only credible threat during bargai...

Wheat from Chaff: Meta-analysis as Quantitative Literature Review

By T. D. Stanley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

This paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research, meta-regression analysis or MRA. Economics is theory-driven. Yet, we must learn empirically if economics is to advance. MRA offers a more obj...

The Cyclical Behavior of Equilibrium Unemployment and Vacancies Revisited

By Marcus Hagedorn and Iourii Manovskii

American Economic Review, September 2008

Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We propose a new calibration strategy of ...

What's in a Grade? School Report Cards and the Housing Market

By David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas

American Economic Review, June 2004

This paper investigates whether the housing market responds to the information incorporated in state-administered school grades. We study whether school grades affect families' residential locations and house prices. Using detailed data on repeated sales ...

Limited Attention and the Residential Energy Efficiency Gap

By Karen Palmer and Margaret Walls

American Economic Review, May 2015

Inattention may be an important contributor to the energy efficiency gap and may be particularly acute in residential buildings where many different features will determine a home's energy use. Energy audits can provide information on how to reduce energy...

Implementing the New Fiscal Policy Activism

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Review, May 2009

Racial Bias in the 2008 Presidential Election

By Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Consumption Effects of the 2007–2008 Financial Crisis: Evidence from Households in Denmark

By Thais Lærkholm Jensen and Niels Johannesen

American Economic Review, November 2017

Did the financial crisis in 2007–2008 spread from distressed banks to households through a contraction of the credit supply? We study this question with a dataset that contains observations on all accounts in Danish banks as well as comprehensive ...

Testing for Racial Differences in the Mental Ability of Young Children

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Review, April 2013

Using a new nationally representative dataset, we find minor differences in test outcomes between black and white infants that disappear with a limited set of controls. However, relative to whites, all other races lose substantial ground by age two. Combi...

House Allocation with Overlapping Generations

By Morimitsu Kurino

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

Many real-life applications of house allocation problems are dynamic. For example, each year college freshmen move in and seniors move out of on-campus housing. Each student stays on campus for only a few years. A student is a "newcomer" in the beginning...

How University Endowments Respond to Financial Market Shocks: Evidence and Implications

By Jeffrey R. Brown, Stephen G. Dimmock, Jun-Koo Kang, and Scott J. Weisbenner

American Economic Review, March 2014

Endowment payouts have become an increasingly important component of universities' revenues in recent decades. We study how universities respond to financial shocks to endowments and thus shed light on a number of existing models of endowment behavior. ...

Selection on Moral Hazard in Health Insurance

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Stephen P. Ryan, Paul Schrimpf, and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Review, February 2013

We use employee-level panel data from a single firm to explore the possibility that individuals may select insurance coverage in part based on their anticipated behavioral ("moral hazard") response to insurance, a phenomenon we label "selection on mora...

Cross of Euros

[Symposium: The Euro]

By Kevin H. O'Rourke and Alan M. Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

The eurozone currently confronts severe short-run macroeconomic adjustment problems and a deficient institutional architecture that has to be reformed in the longer run. Europe's efforts at economic and monetary union are historically unprecedented. How...

Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting: Boston, MA, January 3, 2015

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2015

Discrete Pricing and Market Fragmentation: A Tale of Two-Sided Markets

By Yong Chao, Chen Yao, and Mao Ye

American Economic Review, May 2017

Security trading now fragments into more than ten almost identical stock exchanges in the United States. We show that discrete pricing is one economic force that prevents the consolidation of trading volume. The uniform one-cent tick size (minimum price v...

Economic Theories of Legal Liability

[Symposium: The Economics of Liability]

By Robert D. Cooter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

This essay synthesizes and re-conceptualizes some central results of the economic analysis of liability law and sketches the legal details that drive them. Three different legal mechanisms for creating efficient incentives are examined in turn. The first ...

Productivity Puzzles and R&D: Another Nonexplanation

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Zvi Griliches

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Around 1974-75, output growth and associated productivity measures dropped sharply in the United States and in most other western industrialized nations and continued at rather low rates for most of the rest of the 1970s. During the late 1960s, the growth...

Economic Growth with Bubbles

By Alberto Martin and Jaume Ventura

American Economic Review, October 2012

We develop a stylized model of economic growth with bubbles in which changes in investor sentiment lead to the appearance and collapse of macroeconomic bubbles or pyramid schemes. These bubbles mitigate the effects of financial frictions. During bubbly ep...

Efficiency in Auctions with Private and Common Values: An Experimental Study

By K. Goeree and Theo Offerman

American Economic Review, June 2002

Auctions are generally not efficient when the object's expected value depends on private and common value information. We report a series of first-price auction experiments to measure the degree of inefficiency that occurs with financially motivated bidde...