The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men

[Symposium: The Problems of Men]

By Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, Andrew Cherlin, and Robert Francis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class me...

Who Acquires Information in Dealer Markets?

By Jesper Rüdiger and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Review, April 2020

We study information acquisition in dealer markets. We first identify a one-sided strategic complementarity in information acquisition: the more informed traders are, the larger market makers' gain from becoming informed. When quotes are observable, this ...

Is This Tax Reform, or Just Confusion?

[Symposium: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act]

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

Based on the experience of recent decades, the United States apparently musters the political will to change its tax system comprehensively about every 30 years, so it seems especially important to get it right when the chance arises. Based on the strong ...

Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting, Atlanta, GA, January 4, 2019

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

Modern Family? Paternity Leave and Marital Stability

By Daniel Avdic and Arizo Karimi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

We study how relationship stability of couples is affected by an increase in fathers' involvement in staying home from work with young children. We make use of a parental leave reform in Sweden that earmarked one month of paid leave to each parent in a re...

Stealing trade secrets

[Page]

How much does state-sponsored industrial espionage pay?

Religion, Division of Labor, and Conflict: Anti-semitism in Germany over 600 Years

By Sascha O. Becker and Luigi Pascali

American Economic Review, May 2019

We study the role of economic incentives in shaping the coexistence of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, using novel data from Germany for 1,000+ cities. The Catholic usury ban and higher literacy rates gave Jews a specific advantage in the moneylending...

What Drives Differences in Management Practices?

By Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, May 2019

Partnering with the US Census Bureau, we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in two waves of 35,000 manufacturing plants in 2010 and 2015. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40 percent of thi...

Wealth Distribution and Social Mobility in the US: A Quantitative Approach

By Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Mi Luo

American Economic Review, May 2019

We quantitatively identify the factors that drive wealth dynamics in the United States and are consistent with its skewed cross-sectional distribution and with social mobility. We concentrate on three critical factors: (i) skewed earnings, (ii) differenti...

Segmented Housing Search

By Monika Piazzesi, Martin Schneider, and Johannes Stroebel

American Economic Review, March 2020

We study housing markets with multiple segments searched by heterogeneous clienteles. In the San Francisco Bay Area, search activity and inventory covary negatively across cities, but positively across market segments within cities. A quantitative search ...

Do Economists Swing for the Fences after Tenure?

By Jonathan Brogaard, Joseph Engelberg, and Edward Van Wesep

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Using a sample of all academics who pass through top 50 economics and finance departments from 1996 through 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure...

High Trade Costs and Their Consequences: An Estimated Dynamic Model of African Agricultural Storage and Trade

By Obie Porteous

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Using a new intranational dataset of monthly grain prices and production and a new approach to identify cost parameters, I estimate and solve a dynamic model of agricultural storage and trade covering all 42 countries of continental sub-Saharan Africa. I ...

The Effects of Income Transparency on Well-Being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Review, April 2020

In 2001, Norwegian tax records became easily accessible online, allowing everyone in the country to observe the incomes of everyone else. According to the income comparisons model, this change in transparency can widen the gap in well-being between richer...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2019

On Latin American Populism, and Its Echoes around the World

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Sebastian Edwards

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In this article, I discuss the ways in which populist experiments have evolved historically. Populists are charismatic leaders who use a fiery rhetoric to pitch the interests of "the people" against those of banks, large firms, multinational companies, ...

What They Were Thinking Then: The Consequences for Macroeconomics during the Past 60 Years

By George A. Akerlof

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

This article explores the development of Keynesian macroeconomics in its early years, and especially in the Big Bang period immediately after the publication of The General Theory. In this period, as standard macroeconomics evolved into the "Ke...

From Cashews to Nudges: The Evolution of Behavioral Economics

By Richard H. Thaler

American Economic Review, June 2018

Coarse Grades: Informing the Public by Withholding Information

By Rick Harbaugh and Eric Rasmusen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

Certifiers of quality often report only coarse grades to the public despite having measured quality more finely, e.g., "Pass" or "Certified" instead of "73 out of 100." Why? We show that coarse grades result in more information being provided to the publi...

Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland

By Marcella Alsan, Owen Garrick, and Grant Graziani

American Economic Review, December 2019

We study the effect of physician workforce diversity on the demand for preventive care among African American men. In an experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors. We use a two-stage design, measu...