Credit Spreads and Business Cycle Fluctuations

By Simon Gilchrist and Egon Zakrajšek

American Economic Review, June 2012

Using micro-level data, we construct a credit spread index with considerable predictive power for future economic activity. We decompose the credit spread into a component that captures firm-specific information on expected defaults and a residual compone...

Winter Heating or Clean Air? Unintended Impacts of China's Huai River Policy

By Douglas Almond, Yuyu Chen, Michael Greenstone, and Hongbin Li

American Economic Review, May 2009

A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter

By Claudia Goldin

American Economic Review, April 2014

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the "last" chapter c...

Do Strict Capital Requirements Raise the Cost of Capital? Bank Regulation, Capital Structure, and the Low-Risk Anomaly

By Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler

American Economic Review, May 2015

Traditional capital structure theory predicts that reducing banks' leverage reduces the risk and cost of equity but does not change the weighted average cost of capital, and thus the rates for borrowers. We confirm that the equity of better-capitalized ba...

Is There a Link between Foreclosure and Health?

By Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We investigate the relationship between foreclosures and hospital visits using data on all foreclosures and all hospital and emergency room visits from four states that were among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. We find that living in a neighbo...

Gender, Competitiveness, and Study Choices in High School: Evidence from Switzerland

By Thomas Buser, Noemi Peter, and Stefan C. Wolter

American Economic Review, May 2017

Willingness to compete has been found to predict individual and gender differences in educational choices and labor market outcomes. We provide further evidence for this relationship by linking Swiss students' Baccalaureate school (high school) specializa...

Evil Is the Root of All Money

By Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John Moore

American Economic Review, May 2002

A Portfolio of Nobel Laureates: Markowitz, Miller and Sharpe

By Hal Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Three pioneers of quantitative finance have now been justly honored: Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, and William Sharpe received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1990. From today's perspective it is hard to understand what finance was like before po...

Antitrust Issues in Schumpeterian Industries

By Richard Schmalensee

American Economic Review, May 2000

Inefficient Foreign Borrowing: A Dual- and Common-Agency Perspective

By Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, December 2003

Studying the implications of uncoordinated borrowing, the paper first looks at whether and when countries borrow too much in the aggregate. It then revisits the "original sin" debate, analyzing whether and when equity portfolio investment, international p...

An Introduction to the Law and Economics of Intellectual Property

[Symposium: Intellectual Property]

By Stanley M. Besen and Leo J. Raskind

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Although economists have written on topics of intellectual property for a long time, the impact of economics on public policy in this area has been slight, especially as compared to the influence of professional writings in areas such as antitrust and tax...

New and Old Keynesians

[Symposium: Keynesian Economics Today]

By Bruce Greenwald and Joseph E. Stiglitz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

The purpose of this paper is to describe one strand of New Keynesian literature which explores how increased flexibility of wages and prices might exacerbate the economy's downturn, and to contrast it with other strands of New Keynesian literature. This s...

The Rapid Adoption of Data-Driven Decision-Making

By Erik Brynjolfsson and Kristina McElheran

American Economic Review, May 2016

We provide a systematic empirical study of the diffusion and adoption patterns of data-driven decision making (DDD) in the U.S. Using data collected by the Census Bureau for a large representative sample of manufacturing plants, we find that DDD rates nea...

The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap

By Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor's degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the na...

The Local Political Economy Effects of School Construction in Indonesia

By Monica Martinez-Bravo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

A by-product of the extension of mass education is the increase in the level of education of those eligible for political offices. This can have a profound impact on the effectiveness of local governments. In this paper, I examine the effects of a large s...

Retrospectives: The Marginal Cost Controversy

By Brett M. Frischmann and Christiaan Hogendorn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

From 1938 to 1950, there was a spirited debate about whether decreasing-average-cost industries should set prices at marginal cost, with attendant subsidies if necessary. In 1938, Harold Hotelling published a forceful and far-reaching proposal for margi...

Implications of Intellectual Property Rights for Dynamic Gains from Trade

By Michelle Connolly and Diego Valderrama

American Economic Review, May 2005

The Origins of Endogenous Growth

[Symposium: New Growth Theory]

By Paul M. Romer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

This paper describes two strands of work that converged under the heading of 'endogenous growth.' One strand, which is primarily empirical, asks whether there is a general tendency for poor countries to catch up with rich countries. The other strand, whic...

Social Identity and Preferences

By Daniel J. Benjamin, James J. Choi, and A. Joshua Strickland

American Economic Review, September 2010

Social identities prescribe behaviors for people. We identify the marginal behavioral effect of these norms on discount rates and risk aversion by measuring how laboratory subjects' choices change when an aspect of social identity is made salient. When we...

The Labor Market Impact of Mandated Employment Verification Systems

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Cynthia Bansak

American Economic Review, May 2012

Employment verification systems covered about one out of four people hired in the United States in 2010. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of state-level employment verification mandates on the employment and wages of likely unauthorized workers acros...