The Great Recession: Lessons from Microeconomic Data

By Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

American Economic Review, May 2010

Success and Failure of Reform: Insights from the Transition of Agriculture

By Scott Rozelle and Johan F.M. Swinnen

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2004

The paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance. We focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes, fundamental differences among countries, and relative simplicity of agr...

Partner Choice, Investment in Children, and the Marital College Premium

By Pierre-André Chiappori, Bernard Salanié, and Yoram Weiss

American Economic Review, August 2017

We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depends on their human capital, which depends on the time their parents spend with them and on the...

Beeps

By Jeffrey C. Ely

American Economic Review, January 2017

I introduce and study dynamic persuasion mechanisms. A principal privately observes the evolution of a stochastic process and sends messages over time to an agent. The agent takes actions in each period based on her beliefs about the state of the process ...

Learning to Cope: Voluntary Financial Education and Loan Performance during a Housing Crisis

By Sumit Agarwal, Gene Amromin, Itzhak Ben-David, Souphala Chomsisengphet, and Douglas D. Evanoff

American Economic Review, May 2010

History and the Sizes of Cities

By Hoyt Bleakley and Jeffrey Lin

American Economic Review, May 2015

We contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes. Recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical advantages suggests that path dependence cannot be understood as the m...

Endogenous Variety and the Gains from Trade

By Costas Arkolakis, Svetlana Demidova, Peter J. Klenow, and Andres Rodriguez-Clare

American Economic Review, May 2008

Competition, Markups, and the Gains from International Trade

By Chris Edmond, Virgiliu Midrigan, and Daniel Yi Xu

American Economic Review, October 2015

We study the procompetitive gains from international trade in a quantitative model with endogenously variable markups. We find that trade can significantly reduce markup distortions if two conditions are satisfied: (i) there is extensive misallocation, an...

Human Development in Poor Countries: On the Role of Private Incomes and Public Services

By Sudhir Anand and Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Development is often taken to mean rising incomes. Discussions of the "goals of development" now often emphasize the reduction of poverty, rather than raising average incomes per se. The role of social services—particularly basic health and educatio...

WTO Accession and Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Firms

By Loren Brandt, Johannes Van Biesebroeck, Luhang Wang, and Yifan Zhang

American Economic Review, September 2017

We examine the effects of trade liberalization in China on the evolution of markups and productivity of manufacturing firms. Although these dimensions of performance cannot be separately identified when firm output is measured by revenue, detailed price d...

Illegal Immigration, Border Enforcement, and Relative Wages: Evidence from Apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico Border

By Gordon H. Hanson and Antonio Spilimbergo

American Economic Review, December 1999

Deal or No Deal? Decision Making under Risk in a Large-Payoff Game Show

By Thierry Post, Martijn J. van den Assem, Guido Baltussen, and Richard H. Thaler

American Economic Review, March 2008

We examine the risky choices of contestants in the popular TV game show "Deal or No Deal" and related classroom experiments. Contrary to the traditional view of expected utility theory, the choices can be explained in large part by previous outcomes ex...

What Parts of Globalization Matter for Catch-Up Growth?

By Paul M. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2010

Health and the Economy in the United States from 1750 to the Present

By Dora L. Costa

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that ...

Real-Time Macroeconomic Monitoring: Real Activity, Inflation, and Interactions

By S. Borağan Aruoba and Francis X. Diebold

American Economic Review, May 2010

Estimating Average Treatment Effects: Supplementary Analyses and Remaining Challenges

By Susan Athey, Guido Imbens, Thai Pham, and Stefan Wager

American Economic Review, May 2017

There is a large literature on semiparametric estimation of average treatment effects under unconfounded treatment assignment in settings with a fixed number of covariates. More recently attention has focused on settings with a large number of covariates....

Consumer Confusion in the Mortgage Market: Evidence of Less Than a Perfectly Transparent and Competitive Market

By Susan E. Woodward and Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, May 2010

Panel Discussion

By Alan J. Auerbach, Francine D. Blau, and John B. Shoven

American Economic Review, May 2004

Detecting Learning by Exporting

By Jan De Loecker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

Learning by exporting refers to the mechanism whereby a firm's performance improves after entering export markets. This mechanism is often mentioned in policy documents, but many econometric studies have not found corroborating evidence. I show that th...

150 Years of Patent Protection

By Josh Lerner

American Economic Review, May 2002