Does Public Assistance Reduce Recidivism?

By Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Review, May 2017

Under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, individuals convicted of drug-related felonies were permanently banned from receiving welfare and food stamps. Since then, over 30 states have opted out of the fed...

Shale Gas Development and Drinking Water Quality

By Elaine Hill and Lala Ma

American Economic Review, May 2017

Recent studies have linked shale gas development (SGD) to ground water contamination. The extent of these environmental externalities, to date, remains uncertain. To address this gap, we examine whether shale gas development systematically affects drinkin...

The Role of Marriage in Fighting HIV: A Quantitative Illustration for Malawi

By Jeremy Greenwood, Philipp Kircher, Cezar Santos, and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Review, May 2017

How might policies that promote marriage and/or dissuade divorce help in the fight against HIV/AIDS? This question is addressed employing a choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model, using Malawi as a case study. In the framework developed, indivi...

Sticking with Your Vote: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting for a candidate leads to a more favorable opinion of the candidate in the future. We find support for the empirical relevance of cognitive dissonance to political attitudes. We examine the pr...

Early-Life Malaria Exposure and Adult Outcomes: Evidence from Malaria Eradication in India

By David Cutler, Winnie Fung, Michael Kremer, Monica Singhal, and Tom Vogl

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We examine the effects of exposure to malaria in early childhood on educational attainment and economic status in adulthood by exploiting geographic variation in malaria prevalence in India prior to a nationwide eradication program in the 1950s. We fin...

Credit Supply and Monetary Policy: Identifying the Bank Balance-Sheet Channel with Loan Applications

By Gabriel Jiménez, Steven Ongena, José-Luis Peydró, and Jesús Saurina

American Economic Review, August 2012

We analyze the impact of monetary policy on the supply of bank credit. Monetary policy affects both loan supply and demand, thus making identification a steep challenge. We therefore analyze a novel, supervisory dataset with loan applications from Spain. ...

Population and Economic Growth

By Gary S. Becker, Edward L. Glaeser, and Kevin M. Murphy

American Economic Review, May 1999

How Liable Should a Lender Be? The Case of Judgment-Proof Firms and Environmental Risk: Comment

By Dieter Balkenborg

American Economic Review, June 2001

Street Prostitution Zones and Crime

By Paul Bisschop, Stephen Kastoryano, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

This paper studies the effects of legal street prostitution zones on registered and perceived crime. We exploit a unique setting in the Netherlands where these tippelzones were opened in nine cities under different regulation systems. Our difference-in-di...

Unplanned Purchases and Retail Competition

By Justin P. Johnson

American Economic Review, March 2017

I propose a framework in which asymmetric multiproduct retailers compete for one-stop shoppers who have biased beliefs about their future purchase probabilities (and so make unplanned purchases). One firm carries a full portfolio of products while the oth...

Medicare Part D: Are Insurers Gaming the Low Income Subsidy Design?

By Francesco Decarolis

American Economic Review, April 2015

This paper shows how in Medicare Part D insurers' gaming of the subsidy paid to low-income enrollees distorts premiums and raises the program cost. Using plan-level data from the first five years of the program, I find multiple instances of pricing strate...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

War and Institutions: New Evidence from Sierra Leone

By John Bellows and Edward Miguel

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Industrial Organization of Health-Care Markets

By Martin Gaynor, Kate Ho, and Robert J. Town

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2015

The U.S. health-care sector is large and growing—health-care spending in 2011 amounted to $2.7 trillion and 18 percent of GDP. Approximately half of health-care output is allocated via markets. In this paper, we analyze the industrial organization l...

Bounded Rationality and Robust Mechanism Design: An Axiomatic Approach

By Luyao Zhang and Dan Levin

American Economic Review, May 2017

We propose an axiomatic approach to study the superior performance of mechanisms with obviously dominant strategies to those with only dominant strategies. Guided by the psychological inability to reason state-by-state, we develop Obvious Preference as a ...

Teenage Motherhood and Sibling Outcomes

By Jennifer A. Heissel

American Economic Review, May 2017

Using annual longitudinal data, I show that all children in families with teen childbearing are on a downward trajectory several years before pregnancy begins. Compared to students on similar trajectories from families without teenage childbearing, siblin...

The Emigration of German-Speaking Economists after 1933

By F. M. Scherer

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2000

Economists were among the many scholars uprooted following Hitler's rise to power in 1933. This article reviews a series of books edited by Harald Hagemann and others which provide extensive biographical information on 314 German-speaking economists whose...

Anomalies: Risk Aversion

By Matthew Rabin and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

Economists ubiquitously employ a simple and elegant explanation for risk aversion: It derives from the concavity of the utility-of-wealth function within the expected-utility framework. We show that this explanation is not plausible in most applications, ...

Budget Deficits: Rhetoric and Reality

[Symposium: Budget Deficit]

By Robert Eisner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

Whatever the real or imagined ills of the economy, the news media, most politicians and a fair proportion of the economics profession are quick to point to the culprit: "the budget deficit." No matter that few appear to know or care precisely what deficit...

A Theory of the Consumption Function, with and without Liquidity Constraints

[Symposium: Consumption Behaviour]

By Christopher D. Carroll

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

This paper argues that the modern stochastic consumption model, in which impatient consumers face uninsurable labor income risk, matches Milton Friedman's (1957) original description of the Permanent Income Hypothesis much better than the perfect foresigh...