Accounting for the Growth of MNC-Based Trade Using a Structural Model of U.S. MNCs

By Susan E. Feinberg and Michael P. Keane

American Economic Review, December 2006

In recent decades, U.S. foreign trade grew much faster than GDP, but there is no consensus why. Notably lacking is an understanding of the role of multinational corporations (MNCs), which mediate over half of world trade. We use Bureau of Economic Anal...

More Haste, Less Speed? Signaling through Investment Timing

By Catherine Bobtcheff and Raphaël Levy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2017

We consider a cash-constrained firm learning on the value of an irreversible project at a privately known speed. Under perfect information, the optimal date of investment may be non-monotonic in the learning speed: better learning increases the value of e...

Amplification Mechanisms in Liquidity Crises

By Arvind Krishnamurthy

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

I describe two amplifications mechanisms that operate during crises and discuss the benefits of policy given each mechanism. The first mechanism involves asset prices and balance sheets. A negative shock to agents' balance sheets causes them to liquidate...

The Returns to Microenterprise Support among the Ultrapoor: A Field Experiment in Postwar Uganda

By Christopher Blattman, Eric P. Green, Julian Jamison, M. Christian Lehmann, and Jeannie Annan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

We show that extremely poor, war-affected women in northern Uganda have high returns to a package of $150 cash, five days of business skills training, and ongoing supervision. Sixteen months after grants, participants doubled their microenterprise ownersh...

CSMGEP Profiles: Art Goldsmith

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Bureau of Labor Statistics Seeks Members for Technical Advisory Committee

[News]

December 12, 2017

BLS recently issued a notice that they are seeking nominations for members to the Technical Advisory Committee

Austrian Economics, Neoclassicism, and the Market Test

By Leland B. Yeager

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

Professor Sherwin Rosen correctly suggests that the Austrian and neoclassical schools can be complementary, each accepting much from the other. However his recognition of Austrian strengths needs to be amplified and his criticisms need softening. His appe...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model

[Symposium: Fortieth Anniversary of CAPM]

By André F. Perold

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) revolutionized modern finance. Developed in the early 1960s by William Sharpe, Jack Treynor, John Lintner and Jan Mossin, the model provided the first coherent framework for relating the required return on an investm...

Does the US Labor Market Reward International Experience?

By Susan Pozo

American Economic Review, May 2014

A typical strategy for measuring the returns to international experience—comparing the earnings of returning migrants to comparable non-migrants—has been criticized for not adequately accounting for self-selection. I suggest an alternative, te...

Corrigendum: Optimal Provision of Multiple Excludable Public Goods

By Hanming Fang and Peter Norman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2011

Schooling and the Vietnam-Era GI Bill: Evidence from the Draft Lottery

By Joshua D. Angrist and Stacey H. Chen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

Draft-lottery estimates of the causal effects of Vietnam-era military service using 2000 census data show marked schooling gains for veterans. We argue that these gains can be attributed to Vietnam veterans' use of the GI Bill rather than draft avoidance ...

The Status of Master's Programs in Economics

By Robert J. Thornton and Jon T. Innes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

It is the purpose of this article to report the results of a recent survey which we undertook concerning the content and structure of master's programs in economics. During the fall of 1985, questionnaires were sent to the 221 United States colleges and u...

Gasoline Taxes and Consumer Behavior

By Shanjun Li, Joshua Linn, and Erich Muehlegger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

Gasoline taxes can be employed to correct externalities from automobile use and to raise government revenue. Our understanding of the optimal gasoline tax and the efficacy of existing taxes is largely based on empirical analysis of consumer responses to g...

Using Natural Resources for Development: Why Has It Proven So Difficult?

[Symposium: Oil and Gas Markets]

By Anthony J. Venables

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Developing economies have found it hard to use natural resource wealth to improve their economic performance. Utilizing resource endowments is a multistage economic and political problem that requires private investment to discover and extract the resourc...

Democracy and Reforms: Evidence from a New Dataset

By Paola Giuliano, Prachi Mishra, and Antonio Spilimbergo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2013

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the effect of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financia...

Unbalanced Trade

By Robert Dekle, Jonathan Eaton, and Samuel Kortum

American Economic Review, May 2007

Unequal Societies: Income Distribution and the Social Contract

By Roland Benabou

American Economic Review, March 2000

This paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political "fundamentals" can sustain such different systems of social insurance, fiscal redistribution, and education finance as t...

How Government Statistics Adjust for Potential Biases from Quality Change and New Goods in an Age of Digital Technologies: A View from the Trenches

[Symposium: Are Measures of Economic Growth Biased?]

By Erica L. Groshen, Brian C. Moyer, Ana M. Aizcorbe, Ralph Bradley, and David M. Friedman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

A key economic indicator is real output. To get this right, we need to measure accurately both the value of nominal GDP (done by Bureau of Economic Analaysis) and key price indexes (done mostly by Bureau of Labor Statisticcs). All of us have worked on the...

Persuasion: A Case Study of Papal Influences on Fertility-Related Beliefs and Behavior

By Vittorio Bassi and Imran Rasul

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

We study the persuasive impacts of non-informative communication on the short-run beliefs and long-run behavior of individuals. We do so in the context of the Papal visit to Brazil in October 1991, in which persuasive messages related to fertility were ...

Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation

[Symposium: Automation and Labor Markets]

By David H. Autor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

In this essay, I begin by identifying the reasons that automation has not wiped out a majority of jobs over the decades and centuries. Automation does indeed substitute for labor—as it is typically intended to do. However, automation also comple...