Using State Pension Shocks to Estimate Fiscal Multipliers since the Great Recession

By Daniel Shoag

American Economic Review, May 2013

Has government spending raised income and employment since 2008? I use new data on state pension returns during the Great Recession to recover exogenous changes in spending. Instrumenting with these return shocks, I estimate that each dollar of windfall-f...

Why Have Americans Become More Obese?

By David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Jesse M. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Americans have become considerably more obese over the past 25 years. This increase is primarily the result of consuming more calories. The increase in food consumption is itself the result of technological innovations which made it possible for food to b...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

The Effect of Corporate Taxes on Investment and Entrepreneurship

By Simeon Djankov, Tim Ganser, Caralee McLiesh, Rita Ramalho, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

We present new data on effective corporate income tax rates in 85 countries in 2004. The data come from a survey, conducted jointly with PricewaterhouseCoopers, of all taxes imposed on "the same" standardized mid-size domestic firm. In a cross-section of...

Firm Dynamics, Job Turnover, and Wage Distributions in an Open Economy

By A. Kerem Coşar, Nezih Guner, and James Tybout

American Economic Review, March 2016

This paper explores the combined effects of reductions in trade frictions, tariffs, and firing costs on firm dynamics, job turnover, and wage distributions. It uses establishment-level data from Colombia to estimate an open economy dynamic model that li...

Strategic Vote Trading in Power Sharing Systems

By Dimitrios Xefteris and Nicholas Ziros

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

This paper studies decentralized vote trading in a power sharing system that follows the rules of strategic market games. In particular, we study a two-party election in which prior to the voting stage, voters are free to trade votes for money. Voters hol...

Which Inequality? The Inequality of Endowments versus the Inequality of Rewards

By Ed Hopkins and Tatiana Kornienko

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2010

We introduce a new distinction between inequality in initial endowments (e.g., ability, inherited wealth) and inequality of what one can obtain as rewards (e.g., prestigious positions, money). We show that, when society allocates resources via tournaments...

A Seller's (and Buyer's) Guide to the Job Market for Beginning Academic Economists

By Richard Carson and Peter Navarro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

In an effort to increase the stock of information available to sellers and buyers in the academic job market for beginning Ph.D. economists, this paper presents the findings of a survey of the 1985-86 hiring process by economics departments. The findings ...

Service Delivery and Corruption in Public Services: How Does History Matter?

By Priyanka Pandey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

This paper provides microlevel evidence of how past institutions impact present economic outcomes. It looks at the impact of colonial land tenure institutions on local governance and education outcomes in northern India. Outcomes are worse in villages tha...

Immigration, Social Security, and Broader Fiscal Impacts

By Ronald Lee and Timothy Miller

American Economic Review, May 2000

The Elasticity of Taxable Income with Respect to Marginal Tax Rates: A Critical Review

By Emmanuel Saez, Joel Slemrod, and Seth H. Giertz

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

This paper critically surveys the large and growing literature estimating the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates using tax return data. First, we provide a theoretical framework showing under what assumptions this elasticity c...

Job flexibility

[Research Highlight]

November 30, 2017

A video about the value employees put on alternative work arrangements.

Measuring What Employers Do about Entry Wages over the Business Cycle: A New Approach

By Pedro S. Martins, Gary Solon, and Jonathan P. Thomas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

Rigidity in real hiring wages plays a crucial role in some recent macroeconomic models. But are hiring wages really so noncyclical? We propose using employer/employee longitudinal data to track the cyclical variation in the wages paid to workers newly hir...

Cooperation among Strangers under the Shadow of the Future

By Gabriele Camera and Marco Casari

American Economic Review, June 2009

We study the emergence of norms of cooperation in experimental economies populated by strangers interacting indefinitely. Can these economies achieve full efficiency even without formal enforcement institutions? Which institutions for monitoring and en...

Complementarities and Games: New Developments

By Xavier Vives

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2005

The theory of monotone comparative statics and supermodular games is presented as the appropriate tool to model complementarities. The approach, which has not yet been fully incorporated into the standard toolbox of researchers, makes the analysis intuiti...

Credit Elasticities in Less-Developed Economies: Implications for Microfinance

By Dean S. Karlan and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Review, June 2008

Policymakers often prescribe that microfinance institutions increase interest rates to eliminate their reliance on subsidies. This strategy makes sense if the poor are rate insensitive: then microlenders increase profitability (or achieve sustainabilit...

Pavlovian Processes in Consumer Choice: The Physical Presence of a Good Increases Willingness-to-Pay

By Benjamin Bushong, Lindsay M. King, Colin F. Camerer, and Antonio Rangel

American Economic Review, September 2010

This paper describes a series of laboratory experiments studying whether the form in which items are displayed at the time of decision affects the dollar value that subjects place on them. Using a Becker-DeGroot auction under three different conditions &#...

Are Your Wages Set in Beijing?

[Symposium: Income Inequality and Trade]

By Richard B. Freeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

The economic troubles of less-skilled workers in the United States. and OECD-Europe during a period of rising manufacturing imports from third world countries has created a debate about whether, in a global economy, wages or employment are determined by t...

Evolutionary Theorizing in Economics

[Symposium: Evolutionary Economics]

By Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This paper reviews the case for an evolutionary approach to problems of economic analysis, ranging from the details of individual firm behavior in the short run through industrial dynamics to the historical evolution of institutions and technologies. We d...

Is There an Energy Efficiency Gap?

[Symposium: Energy Challenges]

By Hunt Allcott and Michael Greenstone

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Many analysts of the energy industry have long believed that energy efficiency offers an enormous "win-win" opportunity: through aggressive energy conservation policies, we can both save money and reduce negative externalities associated with energy use. ...