Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

Towards a Political Theory of the Firm

[Symposium: The Modern Corporation]

By Luigi Zingales

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

The revenues of large companies often rival those of national governments, and some companies have annual revenues higher than many national governments. Among the largest corporations in 2015, some had private security forces that rivaled the best secret...

When Do Capital Inflow Surges End in Tears?

By Atish R. Ghosh, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Mahvash S. Qureshi

American Economic Review, May 2016

We investigate in a sample of 53 emerging markets over 1980-2014 whether countries with open capital accounts are necessarily at the mercy of global events, or are able to take policy actions when receiving inflows to mitigate the impact of a subsequent r...

An Essay on Fiscal Federalism

By Wallace E. Oates

Journal of Economic Literature, September 1999

This paper is a selective survey of fiscal federalism. It begins with a brief review and some reflections on the traditional theory of fiscal federalism: the assignment of functions to levels of government, the welfare gains from fiscal decentralization, ...

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