Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Structural Change Out of Agriculture: Labor Push versus Labor Pull

By Francisco Alvarez-Cuadrado and Markus Poschke

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2011

A declining agricultural employment share is a key feature of economic development. Its main drivers are: improvements in agricultural technology combined with Engel's law release resources from agriculture ("labor push"), and improvements in industrial t...

Regulatory Redistribution in the Market for Health Insurance

By Jeffrey Clemens

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

Community-rating regulations equalize the insurance premiums faced by the healthy and the unhealthy. Intended reductions in the unhealthy's premiums can be undone, however, if the healthy forgo coverage. The severity of this adverse selection problem hing...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Does Extending Unemployment Benefits Improve Job Quality?

By Arash Nekoei and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, February 2017

Contrary to standard search models predictions, past studies have not found a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. We estimate a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based regression discontinuity design in Austria. A...

Are Female Leaders Good for Education? Evidence from India

By Irma Clots-Figueras

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

This paper shows that the gender of politicians affects the educational levels of individuals who grow up in the districts where these politicians are elected. A unique dataset collected on politicians in India is matched with individual data by cohort an...

Media Frenzies in Markets for Financial Information

By Laura L. Veldkamp

American Economic Review, June 2006

Emerging equity markets witness occasional surges in prices (frenzies) and crossmarket price dispersion (herds), accompanied by abundant media coverage. An information market complementarity can explain these anomalies. Because information has high fix...

Do Strikes Kill? Evidence from New York State

By Jonathan Gruber and Samuel A. Kleiner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

Hospitals now represent one of the largest union sectors of the US economy, and there is particular concern about the impact of strikes on patient welfare. We analyze the effects of nurses' strikes in hospitals on patient outcomes in New York State. Contr...

Determinants of Economic Growth: Will Data Tell?

By Antonio Ciccone and Marek Jarociński

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Can agnostics rely on international income data to tell them which matter? We find that agnostic priors lead to conclusions that are sensitive to differences across available i...

Kludged

By Jeffrey C. Ely

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2011

Is there reason to believe that our brains have evolved to make efficient decisions so that the details of the internal process are irrelevant? I develop a model which illustrates a limitation of adaptive processes: improvements tend to come in the form ...

Glass-Steagall: A Requiem

By Robert E. Lucas Jr.

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper is a discussion of monetary efficiency, monetary safety, and the relation of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act to both. It contains speculation about whether a modified version of the Act could have postponed or prevented the crisis of 2008.

The Transmission of Democracy: From the Village to the Nation-State

By Paola Giuliano and Nathan Nunn

American Economic Review, May 2013

We provide evidence that a tradition of village democracy is associated with the presence of national democracy today. We also show that a tradition of local democracy is associated with attitudes which are more supportive of democracy, with better qualit...

The Hyperbolic Consumption Model: Calibration, Simulation, and Empirical Evaluation

[Symposium: Consumption Behaviour]

By George-Marios Angeletos, David Laibson, Andrea Repetto, Jeremy Tobacman, and Stephen Weinberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

Laboratory and field studies of time preference find that discount rates are much greater in the short run than in the long run. Hyperbolic discount functions capture this property. This paper presents simulations of the savings and asset allocation choic...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2015

Productivity Growth in World Agriculture: Sources and Constraints

By Vernon W. Ruttan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

During the last half-century, advances in crop production came from expansion in areas irrigated from more intensive application of fertilizers and crop protection chemicals, and from crop varieties that were more responsive to technical inputs and manage...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2015

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Do Oil Windfalls Improve Living Standards? Evidence from Brazil

By Francesco Caselli and Guy Michaels

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls on government behavior. Oil-rich municipalities experience increases in revenues and report corresponding increases in spending on public goo...

Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective

[Symposium: Intergenerational Mobility]

By Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

When economists are concerned with the inheritance of inequality, they typically focus on the intergenerational transmission of income or wealth. In contrast, sociologists are more likely to analyze intergenerational mobility between (and immobility in) d...