The Economics of Maps

By Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long ...

The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire

By Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Review, April 2018

We document substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output, and peasants' nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before the emancipation, provinces where serfs constituted the majority of agric...

Does Regulatory Jurisdiction Affect the Quality of Investment-Adviser Regulation?

By Ben Charoenwong, Alan Kwan, and Tarik Umar

American Economic Review, October 2019

The Dodd-Frank Act shifted regulatory jurisdiction over "midsize" investment advisers from the SEC to state-securities regulators. Client complaints against midsize advisers increased relative to those continuing under SEC oversight by 30 to 40 percent of...

Are Credit Markets Still Local? Evidence from Bank Branch Closings

By Hoai-Luu Q. Nguyen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

This paper studies whether distance shapes credit allocation by estimating the impact of bank branch closings during the 2000s on local access to credit. To generate plausibly exogenous variation in the incidence of closings, I use an instrument based on ...

Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?

By Heather Antecol, Kelly Bedard, and Jenna Stearns

American Economic Review, September 2018

Many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment. Examples include law firm associates, surgical residents, and untenured faculty at research-intensive universities. High...

Dynamism with Incommensurate Development: The Distinctive Indian Model

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Rohit Lamba and Arvind Subramanian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

India's sequencing of economic and political development has been unusual. In contrast to the West and more recently East Asia, democratization has preceded economic growth. Notwithstanding its unique path, India has grown substantially over the last fo...

Review of Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century's thesis is that violence and only violence significantly reduces inequality. It shows supportive cases of violence reducing inequality, es...

Multiple Lenders, Strategic Default, and Covenants

By Andrea Attar, Catherine Casamatta, Arnold Chassagnon, and Jean-Paul Décamps

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

We study capital markets in which investors compete by designing financial contracts to control an entrepreneur's ability to side trade and default on multiple loans. We show that covenants may have anticompetitive effects: in particular, they prevent inv...

Financial Incentives as Signals: Experimental Evidence from the Recruitment of Village Promoters in Uganda

By Erika Deserranno

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

I study the role of financial incentives as signals of job characteristics when these are unknown to potential applicants. To this end, I create experimental variation in expected earnings and use that to estimate the effect of financial incentives on c...

Long-Term Orientation and Educational Performance

By David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, Umut Özek, and Paola Sapienza

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

We study the role of Long-Term Orientation on the educational attainment of immigrant students. Controlling for the quality of schools and socioeconomic characteristics, students from long-term oriented cultures perform better in third grade reading and m...

How Do Tax Incentives Affect Investment and Productivity? Firm-Level Evidence from China

By Yongzheng Liu and Jie Mao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

China initiated a major reform for capital taxation in 2004. Completed in 2009, it introduced permanent tax incentives for firms' investment in fixed assets. We explore a unique firm-level dataset from years 2005–2012 and utilize a quasi-experimental de...

New Evidence on Information Disclosure through Restaurant Hygiene Grading: Reply

By Ginger Zhe Jin and Phillip Leslie

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Ho, Ashwood, and Handan-Nader (forthcoming) replicates table VI of Jin and Leslie (2003) but questions its research design. Robustness checks support our original conclusion—foodborne hospitalizations, as defined in JL, declined in Los Angeles County (L...

Where Does Multinational Investment Go with Territorial Taxation? Evidence from the United Kingdom

By Li Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

In 2009, the United Kingdom changed from a worldwide to a territorial tax system, abolishing dividend taxes on foreign repatriation from many low-tax countries. This paper assesses the causal effect of territorial taxation on real investments, using a uni...

Wages, Human Capital, and Barriers to Structural Transformation

By Berthold Herrendorf and Todd Schoellman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

We document for 13 countries ranging from rich (Canada, United States) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. Moreover, agriculture has less educated workers and lower Mincer returns....

Do You Use JEP Articles in Your Classroom? One More Chance to Share!

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

The Long-Run Dynamics of Electricity Demand: Evidence from Municipal Aggregation

By Tatyana Deryugina, Alexander MacKay, and Julian Reif

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We study the dynamics of residential electricity demand by exploiting a natural experiment that produced large and long-lasting price changes in over 250 Illinois communities. Using a flexible difference-in-difference matching approach, we estimate that t...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

The Firm Size Distribution across Countries and Skill-Biased Change in Entrepreneurial Technology

By Markus Poschke

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Development is associated with systematic changes in the firm size distribution. I document that the mean and dispersion of firm size are larger in rich countries, and increased over time for US firms. To analyze the firm size-development link, I construc...

Financial Regulation: Still Unsettled a Decade after the Crisis

[Symposium: Financial Stability Regulation]

By Daniel K. Tarullo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

A decade after the darkest moments of the financial crisis, both the US financial system and the legal framework for its regulation are still in flux. The post-crisis regulatory framework has made systemically important banks much more resilient. They a...

The New Tools of Monetary Policy

By Ben S. Bernanke

American Economic Review, April 2020

To overcome the limits on traditional monetary policy imposed by the effective lower bound on short-term interest rates, in recent years the Federal Reserve and other advanced-economy central banks have deployed new policy tools. This lecture reviews wh...