Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods

By Leo Feler and Mine Z. Senses

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

We analyze the impact of trade-induced income shocks on the size of local government and the provision of public services. Areas in the United States with declining labor demand and incomes due to increasing import competition from China experience relati...

Equilibrium in the Labor Market with Search Frictions

By Christopher A. Pissarides

American Economic Review, June 2011

Factor Immobility and Regional Impacts of Trade Liberalization: Evidence on Poverty from India

By Petia Topalova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

This paper uses the 1991 Indian trade liberalization to measure the impact of trade liberalization on poverty, and to examine the mechanisms underpinning this impact. Variation in sectoral composition across districts and liberalization intensity across p...

Hiring, Churn, and the Business Cycle

By Edward P. Lazear and James R. Spletzer

American Economic Review, May 2012

Hires occur for two reasons - to grow a business and to replace those who have left (churn). Churn is an important part of employment dynamics, allowing workers to move to their most productive use. We present evidence on churn from the Job Openings and L...

Health, Inequality, and Economic Development

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003

I discuss mechanisms linking health and inequality and review evidence for effects of income inequality on aggregate and individual mortality, over time and over space. I conclude that there is no direct link. Correlations come from factors other than inc...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

Information, Animal Spirits, and the Meaning of Innovations in Consumer Confidence

By Robert B. Barsky and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Review, June 2012

Innovations to consumer confidence convey incremental information about economic activity far into the future. Does this reflect a causal effect of animal spirits on economic activity, or news about exogenous future productivity received by consumers? Usi...

The First-Order Approach to Merger Analysis

By Sonia Jaffe and E. Glen Weyl

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2013

Using information local to the premerger equilibrium, we derive approximations of the expected changes in prices and welfare generated by a merger. We extend the pricing pressure approach of recent work to allow for non-Bertrand conduct, adjusting the ...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

By Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, April 2016

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO's impacts on children's long-term outcomes using tax data. We find ...

Comments

By Richard Watt, Matthew Rabin, and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

Should Urban Transit Subsidies Be Reduced?

By Ian W. H. Parry and Kenneth A. Small

American Economic Review, June 2009

This paper derives empirically tractable formulas for the welfare effects of fare adjustments in passenger peak and off-peak rail and bus transit, and for optimal pricing of those services. The formulas account for congestion, pollution, accident exter...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, June 2002

The Effects of Housing Assistance on Labor Supply: Evidence from a Voucher Lottery

By Brian A. Jacob and Jens Ludwig

American Economic Review, February 2012

This study estimates the effects of means-tested housing programs on labor supply using data from a randomized housing voucher wait-list lottery in Chicago. Economic theory is ambiguous about the expected sign of any labor supply response. We find that am...

Infrastructure, Incentives, and Institutions

By Nava Ashraf, Edward L. Glaeser, and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto

American Economic Review, May 2016

Expensive infrastructure is ineffective if it doesn't travel the last mile. In nineteenth-century New York and modern Africa, disease has spread when urbanites chose not to use newly built sanitation infrastructure to save money. Either subsidies or Pigou...

Sudden Stops and Output Drops

By V. V. Chari, Patrick J. Kehoe, and Ellen R. McGrattan

American Economic Review, May 2005

Verifying the Solution from a Nonlinear Solver: A Case Study

By B. D. McCullough and H. D. Vinod

American Economic Review, June 2003

Bringing Education to Afghan Girls: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Village-Based Schools

By Dana Burde and Leigh L. Linden

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

We conduct a randomized evaluation of the effect of village-based schools on children's academic performance using a sample of 31 villages and 1,490 children in rural northwestern Afghanistan. The program significantly increases enrollment and test sco...

What Hides Behind an Unemployment Rate: Comparing Portuguese and U.S. Labor Markets

By Olivier Blanchard and Pedro Portugal

American Economic Review, March 2001

Behind similar unemployment rates in the United States and Portugal hide two very different labor markets. Unemployment duration is three times longer in Portugal than in the United States. Symmetrically, flows of workers into unemployment are three times...