High-Dimensional Methods and Inference on Structural and Treatment Effects

[Symposium: Big Data]

By Alexandre Belloni, Victor Chernozhukov, and Christian Hansen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Data with a large number of variables relative to the sample size—"high-dimensional data"—are readily available and increasingly common in empirical economics. High-dimensional data arise through a combination of two phenomena. First, the data may be ...

The Effect of Third-Party Funding of Plaintiffs on Settlement

By Andrew F. Daughety and Jennifer F. Reinganum

American Economic Review, August 2014

A significant policy concern about the emerging plaintiff legal funding industry is that loans will undermine settlement. When the plaintiff has private information about damages, we find that the optimal (plaintiff-funder) loan induces all plaintiff type...

Racial Discrimination in Grading: Evidence from Brazil

By Fernando Botelho, Ricardo A. Madeira, and Marcos A. Rangel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

We investigate whether racial discrimination in the form of biased assessment of students is prevalent within Brazilian schools. Evidence is drawn from unique administrative data pertaining to eighth-grade students and educators. Holding constant perfo...

Evolving Monetary/Fiscal Policy Mix in the United States

By Francesco Bianchi

American Economic Review, May 2012

A micro-founded model that allows for changes in the monetary/fiscal policy mix and in the volatility of structural shocks is fit to US post-WWII data. Agents are aware of the possibility of regime changes and their beliefs have an impact on the law of mo...

The Time-Varying NAIRU and Its Implications for Economic Policy

[Symposium: The Natural Rate of Unemployment]

By Robert J. Gordon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

The NAIRU, the unemployment rate consistent with a constant rate of inflation, is estimated, in this paper, as a parameter allowed to vary over time. Value is determined in an econometric model where the inflation rate depends on its past values, demand a...

Distorted Gravity: The Intensive and Extensive Margins of International Trade

By Thomas Chaney

American Economic Review, September 2008

By considering a model with identical firms, Krugman (1980) predicts that a higher elasticity of substitution between goods magnifies the impact of trade barriers on trade flows. In this paper, I introduce firm heterogeneity in a simple model of internati...

Information Disclosure as a Matching Mechanism: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Steven Tadelis and Florian Zettelmeyer

American Economic Review, February 2015

Market outcomes depend on the quality of information available to its participants. We measure the effect of information disclosure on market outcomes using a large-scale field experiment that randomly discloses quality information in wholesale automob...

Eight Questions about Brain Drain

[Symposium: Emigration]

By John Gibson and David McKenzie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

The term "brain drain" dominates popular discourse on high-skilled migration, and for this reason, we use it in this article. However, as Harry Johnson noted, it is a loaded phrase implying serious loss. It is far from clear that such a loss actually occu...

The Great Divide and Beyond: Financial Architecture in Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Erik Berglof and Patrick Bolton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The Great Divide in economic and financial development and the convergence in financial architecture among the successful countries raise fundamental questions about how financial development interacts with economic growth. Is it possible to engineer a de...

Trade Liberalization, Intermediate Inputs, and Productivity: Evidence from Indonesia

By Mary Amiti and Jozef Konings

American Economic Review, December 2007

This paper estimates the productivity gains from reducing tariffs on final goods and from reducing tariffs on intermediate inputs. Lower output tariffs can increase productivity by inducing tougher import competition, whereas cheaper imported inputs ca...

Economics in the Cyberclassroom

By Peter Navarro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The coming of the cyberclassroom may change almost everything we do in teaching economics. This article discusses the size and scope of the cybereconomics market; the range and mix of instructional technologies; course design, development, and content; cy...

Measures of Agricultural Support Policies in Transition Economies: 1994-1997

By Alberto Valdes

American Economic Review, May 1999

Liquidity Trap and Excessive Leverage

By Anton Korinek and Alp Simsek

American Economic Review, March 2016

We investigate the role of macroprudential policies in mitigating liquidity traps. When constrained households engage in deleveraging, the interest rate needs to fall to induce unconstrained households to pick up the decline in aggregate demand. If the...

The Long-Run Effects of Labor Migration on Human Capital Formation in Communities of Origin

By Taryn Dinkelman and Martine Mariotti

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

We provide new evidence of one channel through which circular labor migration has long-run effects on origin communities: by raising completed human capital of the next generation. We estimate the net effects of migration from Malawi to South African mine...

Geography, Depreciation, and Growth

By Solomon M. Hsiang and Amir S. Jina

American Economic Review, May 2015

It has been proposed that geography influences economic growth for many reasons. Previous analyses of comparative development seem to have sidestepped the question of location-dependent depreciation. However the construction of new measures of tropical cy...

From Education to Democracy?

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, and Pierre Yared

American Economic Review, May 2005

Political Losers as a Barrier to Economic Development

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2000

Empirical Evidence on Inflation Expectations in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

By Sophocles Mavroeidis, Mikkel Plagborg-Møller, and James H. Stock

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2014

We review the main identification strategies and empirical evidence on the role of expectations in the New Keynesian Phillips curve, paying particular attention to the issue of weak identification. Our goal is to provide a clear understanding of the role ...

Estimating Top Income and Wealth Shares: Sensitivity to Data and Methods

By Jesse Bricker, Alice Henriques, Jacob Krimmel, and John Sabelhaus

American Economic Review, May 2016

Administrative income tax data indicate that U.S. top income and wealth shares are both substantial and larger than shares observed in household surveys. However, these estimates are sensitive to the unit of analysis, the income concept measured in tax re...

The Ecosystem Impacts of Severe Warming

By Robert Mendelsohn, Iain C. Prentice, Oswald Schmitz, Benjamin Stocker, Robert Buchkowski, and Benjamin Dawson

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper uses a quantitative dynamic ecosystem vegetation model to explore the potential impact of warming up to 9-12 degrees C on global ecosystems. The paper does not find evidence of a global collapse in terrestrial ecosystems but there is evidence o...