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...

Consumption Risk-Sharing in Social Networks

By Attila Ambrus, Markus Mobius, and Adam Szeidl

American Economic Review, January 2014

We develop a model in which connections between individuals serve as social collateral to enforce informal insurance payments. We show that: (i) The degree of insurance is governed by the expansiveness of the network, measured with the per capita numbe...

American Higher Education in Transition

[Symposium: Higher Education]

By Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

American higher education is in transition along many dimensions: tuition levels, faculty composition, expenditure allocation, pedagogy, technology, and more. During the last three decades, at private four-year academic institutions, undergraduate tuition...

The Internet and Local Wages: A Puzzle

By Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein

American Economic Review, February 2012

How did the diffusion of the internet affect regional wage inequality? We examine the relationship between business investment in advanced internet technology and local variation in US wage growth between 1995 and 2000. We identify a puzzle. The internet ...

Hypothetical Thinking and Information Extraction in the Laboratory

By Ignacio Esponda and Emanuel Vespa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

In several common-value environments (e.g., auctions or elections), players should make informational inferences from opponents' strategies under certain hypothetical events (e.g., winning the auction or being pivotal). We design a voting experiment that ...

Why the Middle East is Economically Underdeveloped: Historical Mechanisms of Institutional Stagnation

[Symposium: Middle East]

By Timur Kuran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

Although a millennium ago the Middle East was not an economic laggard, by the 18th century it exhibited clear signs of economic backwardness. The reason for this transformation is that certain components of the region's legal infrastructure stagnated as t...

The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages

By Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein, and Amalia R. Miller

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

Decades of research on the US gender gap in wages describes its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career paths in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper explores the role of "the Pill" in altering women's human capital investments an...

Selection, Agriculture, and Cross-Country Productivity Differences

By David Lagakos and Michael E. Waugh

American Economic Review, April 2013

Cross-country labor productivity differences are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We propose a new explanation for these patterns in which the self-selection of heterogeneous workers determines sector productivity. We formalize our theory...

The Determinants of the Macroeconomic Implications of Aging

By Louise Sheiner

American Economic Review, May 2014

The aging of the US population undoubtedly will be associated with macroeconomic changes. In particular, some combination of lower consumption growth and increased labor input will ultimately be required. But, the timing of these changes can have importan...

Inducing Leaders to Take Risky Decisions: Dismissal, Tenure, and Term Limits

By Philippe Aghion and Matthew O. Jackson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

How can a principal (employer or voter) induce an agent (worker or politician) to choose the "right" actions if risky actions reveal the agent's decision making competence and only dismissal can be used as an incentive instrument? We first show that if th...

Government Transfers and Political Support

By Marco Manacorda, Edward Miguel, and Andrea Vigorito

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

This paper estimates the impact of a large anti-poverty cash transfer program, the Uruguayan PANES, on political support for the government that implemented it. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based on a pretreatment eligibility score, we f...

Behavioral Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Behavior

By George A. Akerlof

American Economic Review, June 2002

Loss Leading as an Exploitative Practice

By Zhijun Chen and Patrick Rey

American Economic Review, December 2012

We show that large retailers, competing with smaller stores that carry a narrower range, can exercise market power by pricing below cost some of the products also offered by the smaller rivals, in order to discriminate multistop shoppers from one-stop ...

Understanding the Increase in Disability Insurance Benefit Receipt in the United States

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By Jeffrey B. Liebman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The share of working-age Americans receiving disability benefits from the federal Disability Insurance (DI) program has increased significantly in recent decades, from 2.2 percent in the late 1970s to 3.6 percent in the years immediately preceding the 200...

How Digitization Has Created a Golden Age of Music, Movies, Books, and Television

By Joel Waldfogel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

Digitization is disrupting a number of copyright-protected media industries, including books, music, radio, television, and movies. Once information is transformed into digital form, it can be copied and distributed at near-zero marginal costs. This chang...

Adolescence and the Path to Maturity in Global Retail

[Symposium: The Future of Retail]

By Bart J. Bronnenberg and Paul B. Ellickson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

We argue that, over the past several decades, the adoption and diffusion of "modern retailing technology" represents a substantial advance in productivity, providing greater product variety, enhanced convenience, and lower prices. We first describe ...