Information and Employee Evaluation: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Public Schools

By Jonah E. Rockoff, Douglas O. Staiger, Thomas J. Kane, and Eric S. Taylor

American Economic Review, December 2012

We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with impe...

Federal Crop Insurance and the Disincentive to Adapt to Extreme Heat

By Francis Annan and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, May 2015

Despite significant progress in average yields, the sensitivity of corn and soybean yields to extreme heat has remained relatively constant over time. We combine county-level corn and soybeans yields in the United States from 1989-2013 with the fraction o...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Is Probability Theory Relevant for Uncertainty? A Post Keynesian Perspective

By Paul Davidson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Mainstream perspectives involving uncertainty presume that expectations are based on either a statistical analysis of past data, with market signals providing information about objective probabilities, or on subjective perceptions of these probabilities f...

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments: On Morals and Why They Matter to a Liberal Society of Free People and Free Markets

[Symposium: The Moral Sentiments]

By Jerry Evensky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

This essay describes Smith's analysis of ethics in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: the interaction of our nature and our nurturing that makes common civic ethics possible and the dynamic interaction of individuals and extant societal constructions that ca...

Growing Like China

By Zheng Song, Kjetil Storesletten, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, February 2011

We construct a growth model consistent with China's economic transition: high output growth, sustained returns on capital, reallocation within the manufacturing sector, and a large trade surplus. Entrepreneurial firms use more productive technologies, but...

Job Selection and Wages over the Business Cycle

By Marcus Hagedorn and Iourii Manovskii

American Economic Review, April 2013

We consider a model with on-the-job search where current wages depend only on current aggregate labor market conditions and idiosyncratic match-specific productivities. We show theoretically that the model replicates the findings in Bils (1985) and Beau...

China's Macroeconomic Performance and Management during Transition

[Symposium: China]

By Shahid Yusuf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

Since reforms started in 1978, China has combined rapid growth with moderate price stability. This paper analyzes China's macroeconomic performance over the past fifteen years with special attention to factors responsible both for the pace of economic exp...

The Research Productivity of New PhDs in Economics: The Surprisingly High Non-success of the Successful

[Symposium: Academic Production]

By John P. Conley and Ali Sina Önder

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

We study the research productivity of new graduates from North American PhD programs in economics from 1986 to 2000. We find that research productivity drops off very quickly with class rank at all departments, and that the rank of the graduate department...

What's the Matter with Tie-Breaking? Improving Efficiency in School Choice

By Aytek Erdil and Haluk Ergin

American Economic Review, June 2008

In several school choice districts in the United States, the student proposing deferred acceptance algorithm is applied after indifferences in priority orders are broken in some exogenous way. Although such a tie-breaking procedure preserves stability,...

Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit

By Francesco Drago, Tommaso Nannicini, and Francesco Sobbrio

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

This paper uses an original dataset covering the presence of local news in medium-large Italian cities in the period 1993–2010 to evaluate the effects of newspaper entry and exit on electoral participation, political selection, and government effici...

Racial Discrimination in the Labor Market: Theory and Empirics

By Kevin Lang and Jee-Yeon K. Lehmann

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

We review theories of race discrimination in the labor market. Taste-based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread, but no existing ...

Risk Shocks

By Lawrence J. Christiano, Roberto Motto, and Massimo Rostagno

American Economic Review, January 2014

We augment a standard monetary dynamic general equilibrium model to include a Bernanke-Gertler-Gilchrist financial accelerator mechanism. We fit the model to US data, allowing the volatility of cross-sectional idiosyncratic uncertainty to fluctuate ove...

Individual Preferences for Giving

By Raymond Fisman, Shachar Kariv, and Daniel Markovits

American Economic Review, December 2007

We utilize graphical representations of Dictator Games which generate rich individual- level data. Our baseline experiment employs budget sets over feasible payoff- pairs. We test these data for consistency with utility maximization, and we recover th...

Mandatory versus Discretionary Spending: The Status Quo Effect

By T. Renee Bowen, Ying Chen, and Hülya Eraslan

American Economic Review, October 2014

Do mandatory spending programs such as Medicare improve efficiency? We analyze a model with two parties allocating a fixed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an infinite horizon. We compare two institutions that differ in wheth...

The Welfare Effects of Misperceived Product Costs: Data and Calibrations from the Automobile Market

By Hunt Allcott

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

This analysis exploits new data from the Vehicle Ownership and Alternatives Survey, which elicits beliefs over the financial benefits of owning higher fuel economy vehicles. The data are used to test for underestimation and to document evidence of "MPG Il...

Global Financial Stability and the Lessons of History: A Review of Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff's This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

By Alan M. Taylor

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

In Reinhart and Rogoff's economic history This Time is Different, the authors provide a panoramic view of crises from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Published just as the current global financial storm arrived, the book quickly showed how his...

Does Job Corps Work? Impact Findings from the National Job Corps Study

By Peter Z. Schochet, John Burghardt, and Sheena McConnell

American Economic Review, December 2008

This paper presents findings from an experimental evaluation of Job Corps, the nation’s largest training program for disadvantaged youths. The study uses survey data collected over four years and tax data over nine years on a nationwide sample of 15,...

The Smuggling of Art, and the Art of Smuggling: Uncovering the Illicit Trade in Cultural Property and Antiques

By Raymond Fisman and Shang-Jin Wei

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

We empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. We generate a measure of illicit trafficking in these goods by comparing imports re...

The Promise of Public Sector-Sponsored Training Programs

By Robert J. LaLonde

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

As concern about workers' skills has risen, so has interest in the role that government training programs might play in addressing 'America's workforce crisis.' One way to gauge whether increased reliance on these programs will substantially improve the s...