The Size Distribution of Farms and International Productivity Differences

By Tasso Adamopoulos and Diego Restuccia

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the determinants of differences in farm-size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity using a quantitative sectoral model featuring a distribution of farms. Measured aggregate factors (capital, land, economy-w...

Producing Organ Donors

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By David H. Howard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Organ transplantation is one of the greatest technological achievements of modern medicine, but the ability of patients to benefit from transplantation is limited by shortages of transplantable organs. The median waiting time for patients placed on the ki...

Economics of Alliances: The Lessons for Collective Action

By Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

This essay provides an up-to-date summary of the findings of the literature on the economics of alliances. We show that the study of the economics of alliances has played a pivotal role in understanding and applying public good analysis to real-world appl...

Measuring Vote-Selling: Field Evidence from the Philippines

By Allen Hicken, Stephen Leider, Nico Ravanilla, and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using data from an anti-vote-buying field experiment we conducted in the Philippines, we report and validate a proxy measure for vote-selling. We demonstrate that our proxy measure, vote-switching, changes as expected with voter preferences and monetary o...

Economic Reforms in India Since 1991: Has Gradualism Worked?

[Symposium: India]

By Montek S. Ahluwalia

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Opinions on the causes of India's growth deceleration vary. World economic growth was slower in the second half of the 1990s, and that would have had some dampening effect, but India's dependence on the world economy is not large enough for this to accoun...

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...