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. ...

The Value of Relationships: Evidence from a Supply Shock to Kenyan Rose Exports

By Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

American Economic Review, September 2015

This paper provides evidence on the importance of reputation in the context of the Kenyan rose export sector. A model of reputation and relational contracting is developed and tested. A seller's reputation is defined by buyer's beliefs about seller's reli...

The Strategic Value of Quantity Forcing Contracts

By David Martimort and Salvatore Piccolo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

We explore the strategic value of quantity forcing contracts in a manufacturer-retailer environment under both adverse selection and moral hazard. Manufacturers dealing with (exclusive) competing retailers may prefer to leave contracts silent on retail...

Tiebout? Or Not Tiebout? The Market Metaphor and America's Devolution Debate

[Symposium: Fiscal Federalism]

By John D. Donahue

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

The market metaphor of intergovernmental choice as a spur to efficiency (formalized by Charles M. Tiebout) is often invoked to support the shift away from Washington and toward the states. But the model translates badly to governments; governmental entry ...

Value-Added Taxation: A Tax Whose Time Has Come?

By Gilbert E. Metcalf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1995

Value-added taxes (VATs) are used in a large number of developed countries and have been under consideration at the national level in the United States in recent years. This paper provides an introduction to the tax for those unfamiliar with it. The autho...

The Persistence of Inferior Cultural-Institutional Conventions

By Marianna Belloc and Samuel Bowles

American Economic Review, May 2013

Our theory of cultural-institutional persistence and innovation is based on uncoordinated updating of individual social norms and contracts, so that both culture and institutions co-evolve. We explain why Pareto-dominated cultural-institutional configurat...

Sooner or Later: Timing of Monetary Policy with Heterogeneous Risk-Taking

By Dong Beom Choi, Thomas M. Eisenbach, and Tanju Yorulmazer

American Economic Review, May 2016

We analyze the effects and interactions of monetary policy tools that differ in terms of their timing and their targeting. In a model with heterogeneous agents, more productive agents endogenously expose themselves to higher interim liquidity risk by borr...

Teaching Modern Macroeconomics at the Principles Level

By John B. Taylor

American Economic Review, May 2000

Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all...

Real Exchange Rate Fluctuations and the Dynamics of Retail Trade Industries on the U. S.-Canada Border

By Jeffrey R. Campbell and Beverly Lapham

American Economic Review, September 2004

Independent Auditors' Report

American Economic Review, June 2004

Distortionary Taxes and the Provision of Public Goods

By Charles L. Ballard and Don Fullerton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Economists have long been concerned with finding an efficient level of public expenditure. The classic statement of the problem was given by Paul Samuelson (1954). An optimal level of expenditure is where the sum of the marginal rates of substitution betw...

Testing for the Disposition Effect on Optimal Stopping Decisions

By Jacopo Magnani

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper develops a new laboratory test of the hypothesis that individual investors sell winners too early and ride losers too long. In the experiment, subjects invest in a risky asset, whose price evolves in near-continuous time, and they are provided ...

Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability, and Corruption: Evidence from US States

By Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do

American Economic Review, August 2014

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population ...

Deconstructing Income and Income Inequality Measures: A Crosswalk from Market Income to Comprehensive Income

By Philip Armour, Richard V. Burkhauser, and Jeff Larrimore

American Economic Review, May 2013

Recent research on levels and trends in the United States in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. We show the sensitivity of alternative income measures in capturing income trends using a unified data set. Focusing solely on ma...

Corruption, Trade Costs, and Gains from Tariff Liberalization: Evidence from Southern Africa

By Sandra Sequeira

American Economic Review, October 2016

This paper exploits quasi-experimental variation in tariffs in southern Africa to estimate trade elasticities. Traded quantities respond only weakly to a 30 percent reduction in the average nominal tariff rate. Trade flow data combined with primary data o...