Team-Specific Capital and Innovation

By Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and Alex Bell

American Economic Review, April 2018

We establish the importance of team-specific capital in the typical inventor's career. Using administrative tax and patent data for the population of US patent inventors from 1996 to 2012, we find that an inventor's premature death causes a large and long...

Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists and Transplant Recipients

By Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Keith Teltser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 t...

An Economic Analysis of Privacy Protection and Statistical Accuracy as Social Choices

By John M. Abowd and Ian M. Schmutte

American Economic Review, January 2019

Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an economic solution: ope...

The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King: A Review Essay

By Roger E. A. Farmer

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

I review The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King, published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2016. I discuss King's proposed regulatory reform, the "Pawn Broker for All Seasons" (PFAS), and I compare it to an alternative solution developed in my own work....

Historical Legacies and African Development

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent's economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus is rem...

Student Loan Nudges: Experimental Evidence on Borrowing and Educational Attainment

By Benjamin M. Marx and Lesley J. Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

We provide the first experimental evidence on the effect of student loans on educational attainment. Loan amounts listed in financial aid award letters ("offers") do not alter students' choice sets but significantly affect borrowing. Students randomly rec...

Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?

[Symposium: Electricity in Developing Countries]

By Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel, and Catherine Wolfram

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

In recent years, electrification has reemerged as a key priority in low-income countries, with a particular focus on electrifying households. Yet the microeconomic literature examining the impacts of electrifying households on economic development has p...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

Universal Basic Incomes versus Targeted Transfers: Anti-Poverty Programs in Developing Countries

[Symposium: Development and State Capacity]

By Rema Hanna and Benjamin A. Olken

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals articulated by the United Nations, number one is the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030. While future economic growth should continue to reduce poverty, it will not solve the problem by itself; thus, there is ...

Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Milton Friedman's Presidential Address

[Symposium: Friedman's Natural Rate Hypothesis after 50 Years]

By Robert E. Hall and Thomas J. Sargent

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

The centerpiece of Milton Friedman's (1968) presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Washington, DC, on December 29, 1967, was the striking proposition that monetary policy has no longer-run effects on the real economy. Fr...

On the Controversies behind the Origins of the Federal Economic Statistics

[Symposium: Public Provision of Economic Data]

By Hugh Rockoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Our federal economic statistics originated in the economic and political divisions in the United States and the bitter debates over economic policy they engendered at the end of the 19th century and during the world wars and Great Depression. Workers we...

Making Moves Matter: Experimental Evidence on Incentivizing Bureaucrats through Performance-Based Postings

By Adnan Q. Khan, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review, January 2019

Bureaucracies often post staff to better or worse locations, ostensibly to provide incentives. Yet we know little about whether this works, with heterogeneity in preferences over postings impacting effectiveness. We propose a performance-ranked serial dic...

Household Matters: Revisiting the Returns to Capital among Female Microentrepreneurs

By Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, and Natalia Rigol

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2019

Multiple field experiments report positive financial returns to capital shocks for male and not female microentrepreneurs. But these analyses overlook the fact that female entrepreneurs often reside with male entrepreneurs. Using data from experiments in ...

Vulnerable Growth

By Tobias Adrian, Nina Boyarchenko, and Domenico Giannone

American Economic Review, April 2019

We study the conditional distribution of GDP growth as a function of economic and financial conditions. Deteriorating financial conditions are associated with an increase in the conditional volatility and a decline in the conditional mean of GDP growth, l...

Do the Rich Get Richer in the Stock Market? Evidence from India

By John Y. Campbell, Tarun Ramadorai, and Benjamin Ranish

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2019

We use data on Indian stock portfolios to show that return heterogeneity is the primary contributor to increasing inequality of wealth held in risky assets by Indian individual investors. Return heterogeneity increases equity wealth inequality through two...

Racial Differences in Police Use of Force: Evidence from the 1960s Civil Disturbances

By Jamein P. Cunningham and Rob Gillezeau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

There is little empirical evidence as to whether protests against policy brutality impact the behavior of police forces. We seek to close this gap by considering the impact of the racial civil disturbances in the 1960s and 1970s on deaths by legal interve...

Who Really Benefits from Consumption Tax Cuts? Evidence from a Large VAT Reform in France

By Youssef Benzarti and Dorian Carloni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

This paper evaluates the incidence of a large cut in value-added taxes (VATs) for French sit-down restaurants in 2009. In contrast to previous studies, which only focus on the price effects of VAT reforms, we estimate the effects of the VAT cut on four gr...

Optimal Income Taxation with Unemployment and Wage Responses: A Sufficient Statistics Approach

By Kory Kroft, Kavan Kucko, Etienne Lehmann, and Johannes Schmieder

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

We derive a sufficient statistics tax formula in a model that incorporates unemployment and endogenous wages to study the shape of the optimal income tax. Key sufficient statistics are the macro employment response to taxation, the micro and macro partici...

Text as Data

By Matthew Gentzkow, Bryan Kelly, and Matt Taddy

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

An ever-increasing share of human interaction, communication, and culture is recorded as digital text. We provide an introduction to the use of text as an input to economic research. We discuss the features that make text different from other forms of dat...

The Dynamics of Motivated Beliefs

By Florian Zimmermann

American Economic Review, February 2020

A key question in the literature on motivated reasoning and self-deception is how motivated beliefs are sustained in the presence of feedback. In this paper, we explore dynamic motivated belief patterns after feedback. We establish that positive feedback ...