Employment, Wages, and Voter Turnout

By Kerwin Kofi Charles and Melvin Stephens Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Using county-level data across several decades, and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that higher local wages and employment lower turnout in elections for governor, senator, US Congress and state House of Representatives, but have no effect on pres...

Rational Attention and Adaptive Coding: A Puzzle and a Solution

By Camillo Padoa-Schioppa and Aldo Rustichini

American Economic Review, May 2014

Adaptive Coding is the property of the brain to adjust its response to statistical properties of the environment. Its effect is an improved discrimination among signals under the constraints on the dynamic range of its response. It can thus be considered ...

Inventories and the Business Cycle: An Equilibrium Analysis of (S, s) Policies

By Aubhik Khan and Julia K. Thomas

American Economic Review, September 2007

We develop an equilibrium business cycle model where nonconvex delivery costs lead firms to follow (S, s) inventory policies. Calibrated to postwar US data, the model reproduces two-thirds of the cyclical variability of inventory investment. Moreover, ...

A Theory of Countercyclical Government Multiplier

By Pascal Michaillat

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2014

I develop a New Keynesian model in which a type of government multiplier doubles when unemployment rises from 5 percent to 8 percent. This multiplier indicates the additional number of workers employed when one worker is hired in the public sector. Gra...

ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition

By Gary E. Bolton and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, March 2000

We demonstrate that a simple model, constructed on the premise that people are motivated by both their pecuniary payoff and their relative payoff standing, organizes a large and seemingly disparate set of laboratory observations as one consistent pattern....

A Political Economy Model of Congressional Careers

By Daniel Diermeier, Michael Keane, and Antonio Merlo

American Economic Review, March 2005

Our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. We specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset. Given estimates of the structural model, we...

Health Care Exceptionalism? Performance and Allocation in the US Health Care Sector

By Amitabh Chandra, Amy Finkelstein, Adam Sacarny, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, August 2016

The conventional wisdom for the health care sector is that idiosyncratic features leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across several different conditions and performa...

Female Labor Supply: Why Is the United States Falling Behind?

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

American Economic Review, May 2013

In 1990, the US had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 OECD countries. By 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth. We find that the expansion of "family-friendly" policies, including parental leave and part-time work entitlements i...

The Hidden Costs of Control

By Armin Falk and Michael Kosfeld

American Economic Review, December 2006

We analyze the consequences of control on motivation in an experimental principalagent game, where the principal can control the agent by implementing a minimum performance requirement before the agent chooses a productive activity. Our results show th...

Trust as a Signal of a Social Norm and the Hidden Costs of Incentive Schemes

By Dirk Sliwka

American Economic Review, June 2007

An explanation for motivation crowding-out phenomena is developed in a social preferences framework. Besides selfish and fair or altruistic types, a third type of agent is introduced. These "conformists" have social preferences if they believe that suffic...

Inside the Refrigerator: Immigration Enforcement and Chilling Effects in Medicaid Participation

By Tara Watson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

"Chilling effects" are a popular explanation for low program take-up rates among immigrants, but the effects of an icy policy climate are inherently hard to measure. This paper finds robust evidence that heightened federal immigration enforcement reduces ...

Reflections on Northern Rock: The Bank Run That Heralded the Global Financial Crisis

[Symposium: Early Stages of the Credit Crunch]

By Hyun Song Shin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

The U.K. bank Northern Rock became the first high-profile casualty of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 when it suffered its depositor run in September 2007. In spite of the television images of long lines of depositors outside its branch offices, ...

Does Federalism Lead to Excessively High Taxes?

By Michael J. Keen and Christos Kotsogiannis

American Economic Review, March 2002

Bayesian Persuasion

By Emir Kamenica and Matthew Gentzkow

American Economic Review, October 2011

When is it possible for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a symmetric information model where a sender chooses a signal to reveal to a receiver, who then takes a noncontractible action that affects the welfare of both player...

Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda

[Symposium: China]

By Bei Qin, David Strömberg, and Yanhui Wu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo--the most prominent Chinese microblogg...

The Effects of Poor Neonatal Health on Children's Cognitive Development

By David Figlio, Jonathan Guryan, Krzysztof Karbownik, and Jeffrey Roth

American Economic Review, December 2014

We make use of a new data resource -- merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002 -- to study the relationship between birth weight and cognitive development. Using singletons as well as twin and sibling fixed eff...

Risk Taking by Entrepreneurs

By Galina Vereshchagina and Hugo A. Hopenhayn

American Economic Review, December 2009

Entrepreneurs bear substantial risk, but empirical evidence shows no sign of a positive premium. This paper develops a theory of endogenous entrepreneurial risk taking that explains why self-financed entrepreneurs may find it optimal to invest in risky...

How Frequent Are Small Price Changes?

By Martin Eichenbaum, Nir Jaimovich, Sergio Rebelo, and Josephine Smith

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2014

Recent empirical work suggests that small price changes are relatively common. This evidence has been used to criticize classic menu-cost models. In this paper, we use scanner data from a national supermarket chain and micro data from the Consumer Pric...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

On the Timing and Pricing of Dividends: Reply

By Jules H. van Binsbergen and Ralph S. J. Koijen

American Economic Review, October 2016

Schulz (2016) replicates the findings of van Binsbergen, Brandt, and Koijen (2012)--henceforth, BBK--and agrees that the average pretax returns on short-term dividend strips are higher than those of the index, but argues that the after-tax returns are not...