What Does Health Reform Mean for the Health Care Industry? Evidence from the Massachusetts Special Senate Election

By Mohamad M. Al-Ississ and Nolan H. Miller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We exploit the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown to the US Senate to evaluate the market's assessment of the impact of the recent US health reform legislation on the health care industry. We find that Brown's election was associated with abnorma...

Transfers in Cash and In-Kind: Theory Meets the Data

By Janet Currie and Firouz Gahvari

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

We review theoretical explanations for in-kind transfers in light of the limited empirical evidence. After reviewing the traditional paternalistic arguments, we consider explanations based on imperfect information and self-targeting. We then discuss the...

Empirical Industrial Organization: A Progress Report

By Liran Einav and Jonathan Levin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The field of industrial organization has made dramatic advances over the last few decades in developing empirical methods for analyzing imperfect competition and the organization of markets. These new methods have diffused widely: into merger reviews and ...

Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research

By Jeffrey L. Furman and Scott Stern

American Economic Review, August 2011

While cumulative knowledge production is central to growth, little empirical research investigates how institutions shape whether existing knowledge can be exploited to create new knowledge. This paper assesses the impact of a specific institution, a biol...

Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime, and the July 2005 Terror Attacks

By Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin, and Robert Witt

American Economic Review, August 2011

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime, looking at what happened to crime and police before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of police officers to central ...

But Economics Is Not an Experimental Science

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Christopher A. Sims

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The fact is, economics is not an experimental science and cannot be. "Natural" experiments and "quasi" experiments are not in fact experiments. They are rhetorical devices that are often invoked to avoid having to confront real econometric difficulties. N...

Changes in Safety Net Use during the Great Recession

By Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

American Economic Review, May 2015

We examine how participation in social safety net programs differs by income-to-poverty levels, and how that relationship changed after the Great Recession. We define income-to-poverty based on the average of 2 years of merged CPS data, and investigate pr...

The Relative Power of Employment-to-Employment Reallocation and Unemployment Exits in Predicting Wage Growth

By Giuseppe Moscarini and Fabien Postel-Vinay

American Economic Review, May 2017

We study the cyclical comovement nominal wage growth (either monthly earnings or hourly wage rate) and labor market flows. We use microdata from the Survey of Income and Program Participation over 1996-2013 to purge composition effects in worker and job c...

The Impact of Shrouded Fees: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in the Indian Mutual Funds Market

By Santosh Anagol and Hugh Hoikwang Kim

American Economic Review, February 2012

We study a natural experiment in the Indian mutual funds sector that created a 22-month period in which closed-end funds were allowed to charge an arguably shrouded fee, whereas open-end funds were forced to charge entry loads. Forty-five new closed-end f...

Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability

By Timothy Besley and Andrea Prat

American Economic Review, June 2006

It has long been recognized that the media play an essential role in government accountability. Even in the absence of censorship, however, the government may influence news content by maintaining a "cozy" relationship with the media. This paper develo...

Competition, Monopoly Maintenance, and Consumer Switching Costs

By Hodaka Morita and Michael Waldman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

Significant attention has been paid to why a durable goods producer with little or no market power would monopolize the maintenance market for its own product. This paper investigates an explanation for the practice based on consumer switching costs an...

U.S. Banks, Crises, and Bailouts: From Mexico to LTCM

By Bong-Chan Kho, Dong Lee, and Rene M. Stulz

American Economic Review, May 2000

Agents with and without Principals

By Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2000

Tax Policy and Entrepreneurial Entry

By William M. Gentry and R. Glenn Hubbard

American Economic Review, May 2000

The Power of Incentives

By Edward P. Lazear

American Economic Review, May 2000

Do Immigrant Inflows Lead to Native Outflows?

By David Card and John DiNardo

American Economic Review, May 2000

Inside the Black Box: The Credit Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Ben S. Bernanke and Mark Gertler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight-money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and externa...

Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field

By Stefano DellaVigna

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

The research in Psychology and Economics (a.k.a. Behavioral Economics) suggests that individuals deviate from the standard model in three respects: (1) nonstandard preferences, (2) nonstandard beliefs, and (3) nonstandard decision making. In this paper,...

Pre-analysis Plans Have Limited Upside, Especially Where Replications Are Feasible

[Symposium: Pre-Analysis Plans in Economics]

By Lucas C. Coffman and Muriel Niederle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

The social sciences—including economics—have long called for transparency in research to counter threats to producing robust and replicable results. In this paper, we discuss the pros and cons of three of the more prominent proposed approach...

Retrospectives: Say's Law

By William J. Baumol

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

What is perhaps most curious about 'Say's law' is the continuing disagreement on its substance and to whom it should be credited. John Maynard Keynes summarized the law as 'supply creates its own demand' but it is now generally agreed that Keynes did not ...