Taxation and the International Mobility of Inventors

By Ufuk Akcigit, Salomé Baslandze, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, October 2016

We study the effect of top tax rates on "superstar" inventors' international mobility since 1977, using panel data on inventors from the US and European Patent Offices. We exploit the differential impact of changes in top tax rates on inventors of differe...

Symposium on Primary and Secondary Education

[Symposium: Primary and Secondary Education]

By Francine D. Blau

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

This article introduces the 'Symposium on Primary and Secondary Education.' It points out that considerable controversy surrounds the issues treated by the articles in the symposium: the effect of the level of resources invested in education on student ou...

Cardinality versus Ordinality: A Suggested Compromise

By Michael Mandler

American Economic Review, September 2006

By taking sets of utility functions as primitive, we define an ordering over assumptions on utility functions that gauges their measurement requirements. Cardinal and ordinal assumptions constitute two levels of measurability, but other assumptions lie ...

Economic Theory and the World of Practice: A Celebration of the (S, s) Model

By Andrew Caplin and John Leahy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

It was the question of how best to balance the costs of ordering and of running out of stock against the costs of holding excess inventory that inspired Kenneth Arrow, Theodore Harris, and Jacob Marschak to introduce the (S, s) model in...

Contracts as a Barrier to Entry in Markets with Nonpivotal Buyers

By Özlem Bedre-Defolie and Gary Biglaiser

American Economic Review, July 2017

Considering markets with nonpivotal buyers, we analyze the anticompetitive effects of breakup fees used by an incumbent facing a more efficient entrant in the future. Buyers differ in their intrinsic switching costs. Breakup fees are profitably used to fo...

A Flawed Ideological Critique

By William B. Walstad

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

In their critique of the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL), Nelson and Sheffrin draw the conclusion that the TEL is an ideological test. In making their case, however, they neglect to cite the TEL Examiner's Manual by John Soper and myself (1987). In the 67...

Beyond the Algebra of Explanation: HOV for the Technology Age

By Daniel Trefler and Susan Chun Zhu

American Economic Review, May 2000

Are There Gender Differences in the Job Mobility Patterns of Academic Economists?

By Christiana Hilmer and Michael Hilmer

American Economic Review, May 2010

Role Models and Arguments for Affirmative Action

By Kim-Sau Chung

American Economic Review, June 2000

Coping with Asymmetries in the Commons: Self-Governing Irrigation Systems Can Work

[Symposium]

By Elinor Ostrom and Roy Gardner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

Many analysts presume that the appropriators of a common-pool resource are trapped in a Hobbesian state of nature and cannot themselves create rules to counteract the perverse incentives they face in managing the resource. The logical consequence of this ...

Vertical Linkages and the Collapse of Global Trade

By Rudolfs Bems, Robert C. Johnson, and Kei-Mu Yi

American Economic Review, May 2011

A common view is that cross-border vertical linkages played a key role in the 2008-2009 collapse of global trade. This paper presents two accounting results from a global input-output framework that shed light on this channel. We feed in observed changes ...

Competition through Commissions and Kickbacks

By Roman Inderst and Marco Ottaviani

American Economic Review, April 2012

In markets for retail financial products and health services, consumers often rely on the advice of intermediaries to decide which specialized offering best fits their needs. Product providers, in turn, compete to influence the intermediaries' advice thr...

Crash and Wait? The Impact of the Great Recession on the Retirement Plans of Older Americans

By Brooke Helppie McFall

American Economic Review, May 2011

This study uses data from pre- and post-crash surveys from the Cognitive Economics study to examine the impact of recent stock and labor market wealth losses on the planned retirement ages of older Americans. Regression estimates imply that the average we...

The Long-Term Impact of Military Service on Health: Evidence from World War II and Korean War Veterans

By Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschênes

American Economic Review, March 2006

During the World War II and Korean War era, the U.S. military freely distributed cigarettes to overseas personnel and provided low-cost tobacco products on domestic military bases. In fact, even today the military continues to sell subsidized tobacco prod...

Public Debt and Changing Inflation Targets

By Michael U. Krause and Stéphane Moyen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2016

What are the effects of a higher central bank inflation target on the burden of real public debt? Several recent proposals have suggested that even a moderate increase in the inflation target can have a pronounced effect on real public debt. We consider t...

Optimal Sovereign Default

By Klaus Adam and Michael Grill

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

When is it optimal for a fully committed government to default on its legal repayment obligations? Considering a small open economy with domestic production risk and noncontingent government debt, we show that it is ex ante optimal to occasionally deviate...

Were There Regime Switches in U.S. Monetary Policy?

By Christopher A. Sims and Tao Zha

American Economic Review, March 2006

A multivariate regime-switching model for monetary policy is confronted with U.S. data. The best fit allows time variation in disturbance variances only. With coefficients allowed to change, the best fit is with change only in the monetary policy rule and...

Knowledge Capital and Aggregate Income Differences: Development Accounting for US States

By Eric A. Hanushek, Jens Ruhose, and Ludger Woessmann

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2017

Improvement in human capital is often presumed to be important for state economic development, but little research links better education to state incomes. We develop detailed measures of worker skills in each state that incorporate cognitive skills from ...

The Economic Lives of the Poor

By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the "extremely poor" people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about th...

The Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

[Symposium: The Bailouts of 2007-2009]

By W. Scott Frame, Andreas Fuster, Joseph Tracy, and James Vickery

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The imposition of federal conservatorships on September 6, 2008, at the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation—commonly known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—was one of the most dramatic events of th...