When and Why Incentives (Don't) Work to Modify Behavior

By Uri Gneezy, Stephan Meier, and Pedro Rey-Biel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

First we discuss how extrinsic incentives may come into conflict with other motivations. For example, monetary incentives from principals may change how tasks are perceived by agents, with negative effects on behavior. In other cases, incentives might hav...

Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?

[Symposium: Automation and Labor Markets]

By Gill A. Pratt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

About half a billion years ago, life on earth experienced a short period of very rapid diversification called the "Cambrian Explosion." Many theories have been proposed for the cause of the Cambrian Explosion, one of the most provocative being the evolu...

The School-to-Work Transition: A Cross-National Perspective

By Paul Ryan

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2001

School-to-work patterns and issues are discussed for seven economies (France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The emphasis is placed on differences across countries in the current labor market position ...

Intergroup Conflict and Intra-group Punishment in an Experimental Contest Game

By Klaus Abbink, Jordi Brandts, Benedikt Herrmann, and Henrik Orzen

American Economic Review, March 2010

We study how conflict in contest games is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our motivation stems from the analysis of sociopolitical conflict. The theoretical prediction is that conflict expe...

Micro Effects of Macro Announcements: Real-Time Price Discovery in Foreign Exchange

By Torben G. Andersen, Tim Bollerslev, Francis X. Diebold, and Clara Vega

American Economic Review, March 2003

Using a new data set consisting of six years of real-time exchange-rate quotations, macroeconomic expectations, and macroeconomic realizations, we characterize the conditional means of U.S. dollar spot exchange rates. In particular, we find that announcem...

Lessons on Monetary Policy from the 1980s

[Symposium: Monetary Lessons of the 1980s]

By Benjamin M. Friedman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

The half-decade running from mid-1982 to mid-1987 was a pretty good era for U.S. monetary policy, as these things go. Even the severe 1981-82 recession served its intended purpose of substantially restoring price stability. At least as judged by the outco...

The Role of Policy in the Great Recession and the Weak Recovery

By John B. Taylor

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper reports on recent research showing that the severe recession of 2007-2009 and the weak recovery have been due to poor economic policies and the failure to implement good policies during the past decade. Monetary policy, fiscal policy, and regul...

Strategic Interaction and Networks

By Yann Bramoullé, Rachel Kranton, and Martin D'Amours

American Economic Review, March 2014

Geography and social links shape economic interactions. In industries, schools, and markets, the entire network determines outcomes. This paper analyzes a large class of games and obtains a striking result. Equilibria depend on a single network measure:...

Passenger Profiling, Imperfect Screening, and Airport Security

By Nicola Persico and Petra E. Todd

American Economic Review, May 2005

Longevity Expectations and Death: Can People Predict Their Own Demise?

By V. Kerry Smith, Donald H. Taylor, and Frank A. Sloan

American Economic Review, September 2001

Time Series Analysis, Cointegration, and Applications

By Clive W.J. Granger

American Economic Review, June 2004

Endogenous Growth Theory: Intellectual Appeal and Empirical Shortcomings

[Symposium: New Growth Theory]

By Howard Pack

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

This paper examines whether the recent theoretical insights stemming from endogenous growth theory have provided a better guide to explaining actual growth experience than the neoclassical model. The paper considers the available empirical evidence on a n...

Wage Subsidies for Microenterprises

By Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Review, May 2010

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Reply

By David Card and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Review, December 2000

How High Are Rates of Return to Fertilizer? Evidence from Field Experiments in Kenya

By Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2008

Inequality and Markets: Some Implications of Occupational Diversity

By Dilip Mookherjee and Debraj Ray

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2010

This paper studies income distribution in an economy with borrowing constraints. Parents leave both financial and educational bequests; these determine the occupational choices of children. Occupational returns are determined by market conditions. If the ...

Shocks and Government Beliefs: The Rise and Fall of American Inflation

By Thomas Sargent, Noah Williams, and Tao Zha

American Economic Review, September 2006

We use a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate the parameters of a “true” data-generating mechanism and those of a sequence of approximating models that a monetary authority uses to guide its decisions. Gaps between a true expectati...

Speculative Asset Prices

By Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, June 2014

The Record and Prospects of the All-Volunteer Military in the United States

By John T. Warner and Beth J. Asch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

From the onset of World War II until July 1973, the draft was a fact of life for male youth in the United States. Since then, America's armed forces have been staffed by volunteers. Recent recruiting difficulties have precipitated calls from some quarters...

From Today's City to Tomorrow's City: An Empirical Investigation of Urban Land Assembly

By Leah Brooks and Byron Lutz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

Because cities are constrained by the boundaries of land ownership, fundamental urban modifications require land delineation changes. We evaluate whether there is enough land assembly--the joining together of two or more parcels of land--to put land to it...