Consumer Bankruptcy: A Fresh Start

By Igor Livshits, James MacGee, and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Review, March 2007

Consumer bankruptcy provides partial insurance against bad luck, but, by driving up interest rates, makes life-cycle smoothing more difficult. We argue that to assess this trade-off one needs a quantitative model of consumer bankruptcy with three key feat...

Participation

By Gary Charness and Martin Dufwenberg

American Economic Review, June 2011

We show experimentally that whether and how communication achieves beneficial social outcomes in a hidden-information context depends crucially on whether low-talent agents can participate in a Pareto-improving outcome. Communication is effective (and ...

Taxation and Corporate Payout Policy

By James Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2004

Trade and the Diffusion of the Industrial Revolution

By Robert E. Lucas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

This paper proposes a model to describe the evolution of real gross domestic product (GDP) in the world economy that is intended to apply to all open economies. The parameters of the model are calibrated using evidence from Sachs and Warner on economie...

The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas

By Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

This paper provides an overview of the long-term impacts of the Columbian Exchange -- that is, the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, technologies, populations, and cultures between the New World and the Old World after Christopher Columbus' voyage ...

Kinship and Financial Networks, Formal Financial Access, and Risk Reduction

By Cynthia Kinnan and Robert Townsend

American Economic Review, May 2012

Kinship networks are beneficial for smoothing consumption and investment, but the channels are not well understood. We study the financing devices used for consumption and investment by Thai households. Households that are connected to banks achieve signi...

Measuring the Output Responses to Fiscal Policy

By Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

A key issue in current research and policy is the size of fiscal multipliers when the economy is in recession. We provide three insights. First, using regime-switching models, we find large differences in the size of spending multipliers in recessions an...

Cross-Country Income Levels over Time: Did the Developing World Suddenly Become Much Richer?

By Robert Inklaar and D. S. Prasada Rao

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

The latest global survey on relative prices and income levels, for the year 2011, showed changes to relative income levels that were larger in lower income countries, thereby narrowing the world income distribution compared to estimates based on the previ...

How Much Can Expanding Access to Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives Reduce Teen Birth Rates?

By Jason M. Lindo and Analisa Packham

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

We estimate the degree to which expanding access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) can reduce teen birth rates by analyzing Colorado's Family Planning Initiative, the first large-scale policy intervention to expand access to LARCs in the Un...

A New Measure of Horizontal Equity

By Alan J. Auerbach and Kevin A. Hassett

American Economic Review, September 2002

Teaching Economics in the 21st Century

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of Economics]

By William E. Becker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

The desire to reverse a downward trend in the number of undergraduates majoring in economics is an impetus to advance the scholarship of teaching economics as we enter the 21st century. This article offers suggestions for changing the concepts taught and ...

Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A "Labeled Cash Transfer" for Education

By Najy Benhassine, Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Victor Pouliquen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been shown to increase human capital investments, but their standard features make them expensive. We use a large randomized experiment in Morocco to estimate an alternative government-run program, a "labeled cash tr...

Risk Preferences Are Not Time Preferences: Separating Risk and Time Preference: Comment

By Bin Miao and Songfa Zhong

American Economic Review, July 2015

Andreoni and Sprenger (2012a,b) observe that utility functions are distinct for risk and time preferences, and show that their findings are consistent with a preference for certainty. We revisit this question in an enriched experimental setting in whic...

Human Capital and Growth

By Robert J. Barro

American Economic Review, May 2001

Designing Efficient Mechanisms for Dynamic Bilateral Trading Games

By Susan Athey and Ilya Segal

American Economic Review, May 2007

Ownership Consolidation and Product Characteristics: A Study of the US Daily Newspaper Market

By Ying Fan

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper develops a structural model of newspaper markets to analyze the effects of ownership consolidation, taking into account not only firms' price adjustments but also the adjustments in newspaper characteristics. A new dataset on newspaper price...

Quantifying Quality Growth

By Mark Bils and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, September 2001

Using U.S. Consumer Expenditure Surveys, we estimate "quality Engel curves" for 66 durable goods based on the extent richer households pay more for each good. The same data show that the average price paid rises faster from 1980 to 1996 for goods with ste...

Public Monopoly and Economic Efficiency: Evidence from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's Entry Decisions

By Katja Seim and Joel Waldfogel

American Economic Review, April 2013

We estimate a spatial model of liquor demand to analyze the impact of government-controlled retailing on entry patterns. In the absence of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, the state would have roughly 2.5 times the current number of stores, highe...

Integration of Trade and Disintegration of Production in the Global Economy

[Symposium: Globalization in Perspective]

By Robert C. Feenstra

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The last few decades have seen a spectacular integration of the global economy through trade. The rising integration of world markets has brought with it a disintegration of the production process, however, in which manufacturing or services activities do...

Child Gender and Parental Investments in India: Are Boys and Girls Treated Differently?

By Silvia Helena Barcellos, Leandro S. Carvalho, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

Previous research has not always found that boys and girls are treated differently in rural India. However estimates of the effect of gender on parental investments could be biased if girls end up in larger families due to son-biased stopping rules. Us...