Global Talent Flows

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, Çağlar Özden, and Christopher Parsons

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Highly skilled workers play a central and starring role in today's knowledge economy. Talented individuals make exceptional direct contributions--including breakthrough innovations and scientific discoveries--and coordinate and guide the actions of many o...

Under Pressure: Job Security, Resource Allocation, and Productivity in Schools under No Child Left Behind

By Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff, and Heather L. Schwartz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

We conduct the first nationwide study of incentives under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which requires states to punish schools failing to meet target passing rates on students' standardized exams. States' idiosyncratic policies created variation i...

Ambiguous Business Cycles

By Cosmin L. Ilut and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review, August 2014

This paper studies a New Keynesian business cycle model with agents who are averse to ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty). Shocks to confidence about future TFP are modeled as changes in ambiguity. To assess the size of those shocks, our estimation uses not...

Retrospectives: The Origins of the Representative Agent

By James E. Hartley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

This paper examines Alfred Marshall's invention of the representative firm. Marshall first used the representative firm in order to describe an industry supply curve for an industry with heterogeneous firms. Despite Marshall's limited use of the notion, t...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2014

Real Wages and the Business Cycle: Accounting for Worker, Firm, and Job Title Heterogeneity

By Anabela Carneiro, Paulo Guimarães, and Pedro Portugal

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

Using a longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset for Portugal over the 1986-2007 period, this study analyzes the wage responses to aggregate labor market conditions for newly hired workers and existing workers within the same firm. Accounting for w...

Interdependent Preferences and Reciprocity

By Joel Sobel

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2005

Experiments, ethnography, and introspection provide evidence economic agents do not act to maximize their narrowly defined self interest. Expanding the domain of preferences to include the utility of others provides a coherent way to extend rational choic...

Simulating Fundamental Tax Reform in the United States

By David Altig, Alan J. Auerbach, Laurence J. Koltikoff, Kent A. Smetters, and Jan Walliser

American Economic Review, June 2001

This paper uses a new, large-scale, dynamic life-cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of transitions to five fundamental alternatives to the U.S. federal income tax, including a proportional consumption tax and a flat ta...

A Theory of Urban Squatting and Land-Tenure Formalization in Developing Countries

By Jan K. Brueckner and Harris Selod

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2009

This paper offers a new theoretical approach to urban squatting, reflecting the view that squatters and formal residents compete for land within a city. The key implication is that squatters "squeeze" the formal market, raising the price paid by formal...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

Remittances and Income Smoothing

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Susan Pozo

American Economic Review, May 2011

Due to inadequate savings and binding borrowing constraints, income volatility can make households in developing countries particularly susceptible to economic hardship. We examine the role of remittances in either alleviating or increasing household inco...

Cost-Effective Policies to Reduce Vehicle Emissions

By Don Fullerton and Li Gan

American Economic Review, May 2005

The Case against Patents

[Symposium: Patents]

By Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correl...

Intergenerational Income Mobility Among Daughters

By Laura Chadwick and Gary Solon

American Economic Review, March 2002

Deregulation, Consolidation, and Efficiency: Evidence from US Nuclear Power

By Lucas W. Davis and Catherine Wolfram

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

Beginning in the late 1990s, electricity markets in many US states were deregulated, and almost half of the nation's 103 nuclear power reactors were sold to independent power producers. Deregulation has been accompanied by substantial market consolidatio...

When Do Secondary Markets Harm Firms?

By Jiawei Chen, Susanna Esteban, and Matthew Shum

American Economic Review, December 2013

To investigate whether secondary markets aid or harm durable goods manufacturers, we build a dynamic model of durable goods oligopoly with transaction costs in the secondary market. Calibrating model parameters using data from the US automobile industr...

Leveraged Buyouts and Private Equity

[Symposium: Private Equity]

By Steven N. Kaplan and Per Stromberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

In a leveraged buyout, a company is acquired by a specialized investment firm using a relatively small portion of equity and a relatively large portion of outside debt financing. The leveraged buyout investment firms today refer to themselves (and are gen...

Susan C. Athey: John Bates Clark Award Winner 2007

By John Roberts

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Susan Carleton Athey is the 2007 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, which is "awarded biennially to that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to econ...

How Do Remittances Affect Human Capital Formation of School-Age Boys and Girls?

By Cynthia Bansak and Brian Chezum

American Economic Review, May 2009

Reputational Incentives for Restaurant Hygiene

By Ginger Zhe Jin and Phillip Leslie

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2009

How can consumers be assured that firms will endeavor to provide good quality when quality is unobservable prior to purchase? We test the hypothesis that reputational incentives are effective at causing restaurants to maintain good hygiene quality. We ...