Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Giovanni Peri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Immigration has been a steady force acting on population and employment within countries throughout human history. Focusing on the last four decades, we show that the mix of immigrants to rich countries has been, overall, rather balanced between college a...

Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being

[Symposium: Happiness Economics]

By Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we d...

What Does Reputation Buy? Differentiation in a Market for Third-Party Auditors

By Esther Duflo, Michael Greenstone, Rohini Pande, and Nicholas Ryan

American Economic Review, May 2013

We study differences in quality in the market for third-party environmental auditors in Gujarat, India. We find that, despite the low overall quality, auditors are heterogeneous and some perform well. We posit that these high-quality auditors survive by u...

Beyond Statistics: The Economic Content of Risk Scores

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender, and Paul Schrimpf

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

"Big data" and statistical techniques to score potential transactions have transformed insurance and credit markets. In this paper, we observe that these widely-used statistical scores summarize a much richer heterogeneity, and may be endogenous to the c...

Financial Exchange Rates and International Currency Exposures

By Philip R. Lane and Jay C. Shambaugh

American Economic Review, March 2010

In order to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exc...

Development

By Joseph A. Schumpeter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2005

The present article introduces Development, a new, unpublished and hitherto unknown article by Joseph A. Schumpeter from 1932. Development is remarkable because it significantly adds to Schumpeter's known works on a number of issues that were central to h...

Are Chinese Growth and Inflation Too Smooth? Evidence from Engel Curves

By Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson, and Miao Liu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

China has experienced remarkably stable growth and inflation in recent years according to official statistics. We use systematic discrepancies between cross-sectional and time-series Engel curves to construct alternative estimates of Chinese growth and in...

The First of the Month Effect: Consumer Behavior and Store Responses

By Justine Hastings and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

Previous research has demonstrated that benefit recipients decrease expenditures on, and consumption of, food throughout the benefit month. Using detailed grocery store scanner data, we ask two questions: whether cycling is due to a desire for variety tha...

Patent Licensing, Technology Transfer, and Innovation

By Mark A. Lemley and Robin Feldman

American Economic Review, May 2016

Traditional justifications for patents are based on direct or indirect contribution to product creation. Non-practicing entities (NPEs) might provide such innovation, either directly, through working the patent or transfer of technology to others who do, ...

Term Premia and Inflation Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from an International Panel Dataset: Reply

By Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Review, January 2014

Bauer, Rudebusch, and Wu (2014) advocate the use of bias-corrected estimates in their comment on Wright (2011). Econometric estimation of a macro-finance VAR provides quite imprecise estimates of future short-term interest rates. Nonetheless, compariso...

Policy Watch: The Repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Advent of Broad Banking

By James R. Barth, R. Dan Brumbaugh, and James A. Wilcox

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

Enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) in November 1999 effectively repealed the long-standing prohibitions on the mixing of banking with securities or insurance businesses and thus permits "broad banking." We attribute repeal of these prohibition...

Scaling for Economists: Lessons from the Non-Adherence Problem in the Medical Literature

[Symposium: From Experiments to Economic Policy]

By Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A. List, Danielle LoRe, and Dana Suskind

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Economists often conduct experiments that demonstrate the benefits to individuals of modifying their behavior, such as using a new production process at work or investing in energy saving technologies. A common occurrence is for the success of the interve...

Recognition for Group Work: Gender Differences in Academia

By Heather Sarsons

American Economic Review, May 2017

How is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed? I use data on academics' publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit is allocated under such uncertainty. While solo-authore...

The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change

By Ronald Lee

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

The global demographic transition began around 1800 in Europe with declining mortality followed by declining fertility, trends which spread around the world and continue in this century. At the aggregate level, population size greatly increased, growth ac...

Monopoly Price Discrimination and Demand Curvature

By Iñaki Aguirre, Simon Cowan, and John Vickers

American Economic Review, September 2010

This paper presents a general analysis of the effects of monopolistic third-degree price discrimination on welfare and output when all markets are served. Sufficient conditions — involving straightforward comparisons of the curvatures of the direct...

R&D, International Sourcing, and the Joint Impact on Firm Performance

By Esther Ann Bøler, Andreas Moxnes, and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe

American Economic Review, December 2015

This paper studies the impact of an R&D cost shock on R&D investments, imported inputs, and their joint impact on firm performance. We introduce imported inputs into a model of R&D and endogenous productivity, and show that R&D and international sourcing ...

A Group Rule-Utilitarian Approach to Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence

By Stephen Coate and Michael Conlin

American Economic Review, December 2004

This paper explores a group rule–utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout, inspired by the theoretical work of John C. Harsanyi (1980) and Timothy J. Feddersen and Alvaro Sandroni (2002). It develops a model based on this approach and studies...

Sales Taxes and Internet Commerce

By Liran Einav, Dan Knoepfle, Jonathan Levin, and Neel Sundaresan

American Economic Review, January 2014

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using eBay data. Our first approach exploits the fact that a seller's location—and therefore the applicable tax rate—is revealed only after a buyer has expressed interest in a...

How Regional Blocs Affect Excluded Countries: The Price Effects of MERCOSUR

By Won Chang and L. Alan Winters

American Economic Review, September 2002

The welfare effects of PTAs are most directly linked to changes in trade prices, i.e., the terms of trade. This paper employs a simple strategic pricing game in segmented markets to measure the effects of MERCOSUR on the pricing of "nonmember" exports to ...

Inflows of Capital to Developing Countries in the 1990s

By Guillermo A. Calvo, Leonardo Leiderman, and Carmen M. Reinhart

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Half a decade has passed since the resurgence of international capital flows to many developing countries and history has, once again, shown that foreign investment is prone to repeated booms and busts. Mexico's 1994 crisis is but a recent example that hi...