Can American agriculture adapt to a hotter climate?

[Research Highlight]

July 28, 2016

How corn and soybean crops fared in the counties hit hardest by climate change

Do Chinese government inflation data hold up to scrutiny?

[Research Highlight]

July 12, 2016

Engel curves reveal a more complicated story about inflation and growth than official statistics

Why a carbon tax on shipping would harm the world’s poorest economies

[Research Highlight]

November 22, 2016

Countries at risk from climate change are also the most dependent on fossil fuels

Retail price reality check

[Research Highlight]

December 20, 2016

How often are prices for items bought online the same as what shoppers pay in stores?

Conspiracies against the public

[Research Highlight]

February 03, 2017

The textbook description of cartels can’t explain what real-world cartels do

Do firms lobby politicians by patronizing their businesses?

[Research Highlight]

March 26, 2016

The case of Berlusconi's media empire

From the archives: Do firms lobby politicians by patronizing their businesses?

[Research Highlight]

April 17, 2017

In the 2017 AEJ:Applied Best Paper, the authors study how companies in Italy responded to the political rise of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi

Why do people give?

[Research Highlight]

November 21, 2017

An interview with Lise Vesterlund on how economics can help us better understand altruism.

A better way to feed the poor

[Page]

A national nonprofit develops a more efficient system to allocate food donations.

Consumption Smoothing and Frequency of Benefit Payments of Cash Transfer Programs

By Emma Aguila, Arie Kapteyn, and Francisco Perez-Arce

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze two noncontributory Mexican pension programs for the elderly. Both paid similar amounts, but one paid monthly while the other paid every two months. The Life Cycle Hypothesis suggests frequency of benefits payments should not affect consumption...

How Food Banks Use Markets to Feed the Poor

By Canice Prendergast

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

A difficult issue for organizations is how to assign valuable resources across competing opportunities. This work describes how Feeding America allocates about 300 million pounds of food a year to over two hundred food banks across the United States. It d...

US Food Aid and Civil Conflict

By Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in U.S. wheat production and cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any U.S. food ai...

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment

By David Neumark and William Wascher

American Economic Review, December 2000

Consumption Inequality and Partial Insurance

By Richard Blundell, Luigi Pistaferri, and Ian Preston

American Economic Review, December 2008

This paper examines the link between income and consumption inequality. We create panel data on consumption for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics using an imputation procedure based on food demand estimates from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We doc...

Are Chinese Growth and Inflation Too Smooth? Evidence from Engel Curves

By Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson, and Miao Liu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

China has experienced remarkably stable growth and inflation in recent years according to official statistics. We use systematic discrepancies between cross-sectional and time-series Engel curves to construct alternative estimates of Chinese growth and in...

The First of the Month Effect: Consumer Behavior and Store Responses

By Justine Hastings and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

Previous research has demonstrated that benefit recipients decrease expenditures on, and consumption of, food throughout the benefit month. Using detailed grocery store scanner data, we ask two questions: whether cycling is due to a desire for variety tha...

Habit Formation in Consumer Preferences: Evidence from Panel Data

By Karen E. Dynan

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper tests for the presence of habit formation using household data. A simple model of habit formation implies a condition relating the strength of habits to the evolution of consumption over time. When the condition is estimated with food consumpti...

Agriculture in the Global Economy

[Symposium: Agriculture]

By Julian M. Alston and Philip G. Pardey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

The past 50-100 years have witnessed dramatic changes in agricultural production and productivity, driven to a great extent by public and private investments in agricultural research, with profound implications especially for the world's poor. In this a...

International Income Inequality: Measuring PPP Bias by Estimating Engel Curves for Food

By Ingvild Almås

American Economic Review, April 2012

Purchasing power-adjusted incomes applied in cross-country comparisons are measured with bias. This paper estimates the purchasing power parity (PPP) bias in Penn World Table incomes and provides corrected incomes. The bias is substantial and systematic: ...

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Reply

By David Card and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Review, December 2000