How Do Patent Laws Influence Innovation? Evidence from Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs

By Petra Moser

American Economic Review, September 2005

Studies of innovation have focused on the effects of patent laws on the number of innovations, but have ignored effects on the direction of technological change. This paper introduces a new dataset of close to fifteen thousand innovations at the Crystal P...

Do Immigrants and Their Children Free Ride More Than Natives?

By Una Okonkwo Osili and Jia Xie

American Economic Review, May 2009

Structural Change in a Multisector Model of Growth

By L. Rachel Ngai and Christopher A. Pissarides

American Economic Review, March 2007

We study a multisector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of structural change, characterized by sectoral labor reallocation and balanced aggregate growth. The condition...

Price Pressure in the Government Bond Market

By Robin Greenwood and Dimitri Vayanos

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Impact of Economic Freedom on the Black/White Income Gap

By Gary A. Hoover, Ryan A. Compton, and Daniel C. Giedeman

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using state-level data from 1980-2010 we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has had any impact in increasing or decreasing the ratio of median income for black households to the median income of w...

Efficiency and Substitutability of Transit Subsidies and Other Urban Transport Policies

By Leonardo J. Basso and Hugo E. Silva

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

This paper analyzes the efficiency of and the substitutability between three urban congestion management policies: transit subsidization, car congestion pricing, and dedicated bus lanes. The model features user heterogeneity, cross-congestion effects b...

Taxation and International Migration of Superstars: Evidence from the European Football Market

By Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, Camille Landais, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Review, August 2013

We analyze the effects of top tax rates on international migration of football players in 14 European countries since 1985. Both country case studies and multinomial regressions show evidence of strong mobility responses to tax rates, with an elasticit...

Cooperation under the Shadow of the Future: Experimental Evidence from Infinitely Repeated Games

By Pedro Dal Bó

American Economic Review, December 2005

While there is an extensive literature on the theory of infinitely repeated games, empirical evidence on how "the shadow of the future" affects behavior is scarce and inconclusive. I simulate infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma games in the lab with a ...

Reference-Dependent Preferences and Labor Supply: The Case of New York City Taxi Drivers

By Henry S. Farber

American Economic Review, June 2008

I develop a model of daily labor supply where preferences are dependent on a reference daily income level, and I apply this model to data on the labor supply of New York City taxi drivers. I find that there may be a reference level of income on a given da...

Why Do Payment Card Networks Charge Proportional Fees?

By Oz Shy and Zhu Wang

American Economic Review, June 2011

This paper explains why payment card networks charge fees that are proportional to the transaction values instead of charging fixed per-transaction fees. We show that, when card networks and merchants both have market power, card networks earn higher prof...

Can Alcohol Prohibition Reduce Violence against Women?

By Dara Lee Luca, Emily Owens, and Gunjan Sharma

American Economic Review, May 2015

Violence against women is a critical problem across the world. In this paper, we exploit state and temporal variation in alcohol control in India to examine the impact of prohibition on alcohol consumption and violent crimes against women. We first use de...

Insuring Consumption Against Illness

By Paul Gertler and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, March 2002

One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness. We investigate the extent to which families are able to insure consumption against major illness using a unique panel data set from In...

Can News about the Future Drive the Business Cycle?

By Nir Jaimovich and Sergio Rebelo

American Economic Review, September 2009

Aggregate and sectoral comovement are central features of business cycles, so the ability to generate comovement is a natural litmus test for macroeconomic models. But it is a test that most models fail. We propose a unified model that generates aggreg...

You Owe Me

By Ulrike Malmendier and Klaus M. Schmidt

American Economic Review, February 2017

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understa...

Housing Vouchers and the Price of Rental Housing

By Michael D. Eriksen and Amanda Ross

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

We estimate the effect of increasing the supply of housing vouchers on rents using a panel of housing units in the American Housing Survey. We do not find that an increase in vouchers affected the overall price of rental housing but do estimate difference...

Disaster Risk and Business Cycles

By François Gourio

American Economic Review, October 2012

Motivated by the evidence that risk premia are large and countercyclical, this paper studies a tractable real business cycle model with a small risk of economic disaster, such as the Great Depression. An increase in disaster risk leads to a decline of em...

The 11-20 Money Request Game: A Level-k Reasoning Study

By Ayala Arad and Ariel Rubinstein

American Economic Review, December 2012

We study experimentally a new two-player game: each player requests an amount between 11 and 20 shekels. He receives the requested amount and if he requests exactly one shekel less than the other player, he receives an additional 20 shekels. Level-k reas...

Does Forest Loss Increase Human Disease? Evidence from Nigeria

By Julia Berazneva and Tanya S. Byker

American Economic Review, May 2017

We examine the impact of forest loss on three infectious diseases attributed to modifiable environmental factors in the last decade in Nigeria. Geolinking a new high-resolution dataset of global forest change to child-level health data from the Nigeria De...

Civil Service Rules and Policy Choices: Evidence from US State Governments

By Gergely Ujhelyi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

This paper studies the policy impact of civil service regulations, exploiting reforms undertaken by US state governments throughout the twentieth century. These reforms replaced political patronage with a civil service recruited based on merit and prot...

Effects of Fiscal Stimulus in Structural Models

By Günter Coenen, Christopher J. Erceg, Charles Freedman, Davide Furceri, Michael Kumhof, René Lalonde, Douglas Laxton, Jesper Lindé, Annabelle Mourougane, Dirk Muir, Susanna Mursula, Carlos de Resende, John Roberts, Werner Roeger, Stephen Snudden, Mathias Trabandt, and Jan in't Veld

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

The paper subjects seven structural DSGE models, all used heavily by policymaking institutions, to discretionary fiscal stimulus shocks using seven different fiscal instruments, and compares the results to those of two prominent academic DSGE models. Th...