Incentive Reversal

By Eyal Winter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

By incentive reversal we refer to situations in which an increase in rewards for all agents results in fewer agents exerting effort. We show that externalities among peers may give rise to such intriguing situations even when all agents are fully ratio...

Minimum Wages and Firm Profitability

By Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We study the impact of minimum wages on firm profitability, exploiting the changes induced by the introduction of a UK national minimum wage in 1999. We use pre-policy information on the distribution of wages to implement a difference-in-differences appro...

The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins

By Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. We su...

When Does Coordination Require Centralization?

By Ricardo Alonso, Wouter Dessein, and Niko Matouschek

American Economic Review, March 2008

This paper compares centralized and decentralized coordination when managers are privately informed and communicate strategically. We consider a multidivisional organization in which decisions must be adapted to local conditions but also coordinated wi...

Charitable Giving, Income, and Taxes: An Analysis of Panel Data

By Gerald E. Auten, Holger Sieg, and Charles T. Clotfelter

American Economic Review, March 2002

Does Caste Still Define Disparity? A Look at Inequality in Kerala, India

By Ashwini Deshpande

American Economic Review, May 2000

Agricultural Productivity Differences across Countries

By Douglas Gollin, David Lagakos, and Michael E. Waugh

American Economic Review, May 2014

Recent studies argue that cross-country labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture than in the aggregate. We reexamine the agricultural productivity data underlying this conclusion using new evidence from disaggregate sources. We find t...

Distributional and Efficiency Impacts of Gasoline Taxes: An Econometrically Based Multi-market Study

By Antonio M. Bento, Lawrence H. Goulder, Emeric Henry, Mark R. Jacobsen, and Roger H. von Haefen

American Economic Review, May 2005

The Rise of Middle Kingdoms: Emerging Economies in Global Trade

[Symposium: International Trade]

By Gordon H. Hanson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

In this paper, I examine changes in international trade associated with the integration of low- and middle-income countries into the global economy. Led by China and India, the share of developing economies in global exports more than doubled between 1994...

Determinants of Redistributive Politics: An Empirical Analysis of Land Reforms in West Bengal, India

By Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee

American Economic Review, September 2010

We investigate political determinants of land reform implementation in the Indian state of West Bengal. Using a village panel spanning 1974-1998, we do not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that land reforms were positively and monotonically relat...

Why Do College-Going Interventions Work?

By Scott Carrell and Bruce Sacerdote

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

We present evidence from a series of field experiments in college coaching/mentoring. We find large impacts on college attendance and persistence, but only in the treatments where we use an intensive boots-on-the-ground approach to helping students. Our...

Comment on Poirer: The Subjective Perspective of a "Spiritual Bayesian"

By John Rust

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

[This paper responds to "Frequentist and Subjectivist Perspectives on the Problems of Model Building in Economics," by Dale J. Poirier, in this same issue.] Professor Dale Poirier has preached a rousing sermon for the Bayesian cause and in doing so has co...

The Relationship between Unit Cost and Cumulative Quantity and the Evidence for Organizational Learning-by-Doing

By Peter Thompson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

The concept of a learning curve for individuals has been around since the beginning of the twentieth century. The idea that an analogous phenomenon might also apply at the level of the organization took longer to emerge, but it had begun to figure promine...

The Value and Ownership of Intangible Capital

By Andrea L. Eisfeldt and Dimitris Papanikolaou

American Economic Review, May 2014

Intangible capital which relies on essential human inputs, or "organization capital," presents a unique challenge for measurement. Organization capital cannot be fully owned by firms' financiers, because it is partly embodied in key labor inputs. Instead,...

Declining Dynamism, Allocative Efficiency, and the Productivity Slowdown

By Ryan A. Decker, John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review, May 2017

A large literature documents declining measures of business dynamism including high-growth young firm activity and job reallocation. A distinct literature describes a slowdown in the pace of aggregate labor productivity growth. We relate these patterns by...

Causal Spousal Health Spillover Effects and Implications for Program Evaluation

By Jason Fletcher and Ryne Marksteiner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

Current methods of cost effectiveness analysis implicitly assume zero spillovers among social ties. This can underestimate the benefits of health interventions and misallocate resources toward interventions with lower comprehensive effects. We discuss the...

Will Public Sector Retiree Health Benefit Plans Survive? Economic and Policy Implications of Unfunded Liabilities

By Robert L. Clark

American Economic Review, May 2009

Taxpayer Confusion: Evidence from the Child Tax Credit

By Naomi E. Feldman, Peter Katuščák, and Laura Kawano

American Economic Review, March 2016

We develop an empirical test for whether households understand or misperceive their marginal tax rate. Our identifying variation comes from the loss of the Child Tax Credit when a child turns 17. Using this age discontinuity, we find that despite this ...

Social Preferences under Risk: Equality of Opportunity versus Equality of Outcome

By Kota Saito

American Economic Review, December 2013

This paper axiomatizes a utility function for social preferences under risk. In the model, a single parameter captures a preference for equality of opportunity (i.e., equality of exante expected payoffs) relative to equality of outcome (i.e., equality o...

Income Smoothing and Consumption Smoothing

[Symposium: Consumption Smoothing in Developing Countries]

By Jonathan Morduch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

One way that risk-averse households protect consumption levels is to borrow and use insurance mechanisms. Another way, common in low-income economies, is to diversify economic activities and make conservative production and employment choices. Households ...