Experimental Age Discrimination Evidence and the Heckman Critique

By David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button

American Economic Review, May 2016

We design and implement a large-scale field experiment on age discrimination to address limitations of past research that may bias their results. One limitation is the practice of giving older and younger applicants similar experience in the job to which ...

A Reassessment of the Relationship between Inequality and Growth

By Kristin J. Forbes

American Economic Review, September 2000

This paper challenges the current belief that income inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth. It uses an improved data set on income inequality, which not only reduces measurement error, but also allows estimation via a panel technique...

The Process of Socialist Economic Transformation

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By Stanley Fischer and Alan Gelb

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

In this paper, we consider the reform process in those Central and East European countries that have made the decision to move from a more-or a less-planned socialist system to a private market economy, one in which private ownership predominates and most...

Monetary Policy and Multiple Equilibria

By Jess Benhabib, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, and Martín Uribe

American Economic Review, March 2001

This paper characterizes conditions under which interest-rate feedback rules that set the nominal interest rate as an increasing function of the inflation rate induce aggregate instability by generating multiple equilibria. It shows that these conditions ...

Do Government Grants to Private Charities Crowd Out Giving or Fund-raising?

By James Andreoni and A. Abigail Payne

American Economic Review, June 2003

Economists have long observed that crowding out of government grants to private charities is incomplete. The accepted belief is that givers treat the grants as imperfect substitutes for private giving. We theoretically and empirically investigate a second...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

Cross-Country Technology Diffusion: The Case of Computers

By Francesco Caselli and Wilbur John Coleman

American Economic Review, May 2001

Neural Activity Reveals Preferences without Choices

By Alec Smith, B. Douglas Bernheim, Colin F. Camerer, and Antonio Rangel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

We investigate the feasibility of inferring the choices people would make (if given the opportunity) based on their neural responses to the pertinent prospects when they are not engaged in actual decision making. The ability to make such inferences is ...

Testing Ambiguity Models through the Measurement of Probabilities for Gains and Losses

By Aurélien Baillon and Han Bleichrodt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

This paper reports on two experiments that test the descriptive validity of ambiguity models using a natural source of uncertainty (the evolution of stock indices) and both gains and losses. We observed violations of probabilistic sophistication, violatio...

Vendettas

By Friedel Bolle, Jonathan H. W. Tan, and Daniel John Zizzo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

Vendettas occur in many real-world settings where rivals compete for a prize, e.g., winning a competitive promotion or retaining a job, by engaging in aggressive, retaliatory behavior. We present a benchmark experiment where two players have an initial ...

Inefficiency Measurement

By Christopher P. Chambers and Alan D. Miller

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

We introduce an ordinal model of efficiency measurement. Our primitive is a notion of efficiency that is comparative, but not cardinal or absolute. In this framework, we postulate axioms that an ordinal efficiency measure should satisfy. Primary among t...

The Impact of Intergovernmental Transfers on Education Outcomes and Poverty Reduction

By Stephan Litschig and Kevin M. Morrison

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

This paper provides regression discontinuity evidence on development impacts of intergovernmental transfers. Extra transfers in Brazil increased local government spending per capita by about 20 percent over a 4 year period with no evidence of crowding ...

When Is a Risky Asset "Urgently Needed"?

By Felix Kubler, Larry Selden, and Xiao Wei

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

Risk free asset demand in the classic portfolio problem is shown to decrease with income if and only if the consumer's uncertainty preferences over assets satisfy the preference condition that the risk free asset is more readily substituted for the ris...

Communication, Renegotiation, and the Scope for Collusion

By David J. Cooper and Kai-Uwe Kühn

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

We study the effect of communication in an experimental game where cooperation is consistent with equilibrium play if players share an understanding that cheating will be punished. Consistent with communication acting as a coordinating device, credible...

Candidates, Character, and Corruption

By B. Douglas Bernheim and Navin Kartik

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

We study the characteristics of self-selected candidates in corrupt political systems. Individuals differ along two dimensions of unobservable character: public spirit (altruism) and honesty (disutility from selling out to special interests). Both aspe...

Intermediate Goods and Weak Links in the Theory of Economic Development

By Charles I. Jones

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2011

What explains the enormous differences in incomes across countries? This paper returns to two old ideas: linkages and complementarity. First, linkages between firms through intermediate goods deliver a multiplier similar to the one associated with capita...

The Mystery of the Excess Trade (Balances)

By Donald R. Davis and David E. Weinstein

American Economic Review, May 2002

The Macroeconomics of Child Labor Regulation

By Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, December 2005

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. Workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban, unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income. Fertility decisions lock agents...

Machine Learning Methods for Demand Estimation

By Patrick Bajari, Denis Nekipelov, Stephen P. Ryan, and Miaoyu Yang

American Economic Review, May 2015

We survey and apply several techniques from the statistical and computer science literature to the problem of demand estimation. To improve out-of-sample prediction accuracy, we propose a method of combining the underlying models via linear regression. Ou...

Output Fluctuations in the United States: What Has Changed since the Early 1980's?

By Margaret M. McConnell and Gabriel Perez-Quiros

American Economic Review, December 2000