Returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

By Christina Paxson and Cecilia Elena Rouse

American Economic Review, May 2008

Cities Are Physical Too: Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance

By Nikhil Naik, Ramesh Raskar, and César A. Hidalgo

American Economic Review, May 2016

For social scientists, developing an empirical connection between the physical appearance of a city and the behavior and health of its inhabitants has proved challenging due to a lack of data on urban appearance. Can we use computers to quantify urban app...

The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue...

Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century...

Automobile Externalities and Policies

By Ian W. H. Parry, Margaret Walls, and Winston Harrington

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2007

This paper discusses the nature, and magnitude, of externalities associated with automobile use, including local and global pollution, oil dependence, traffic congestion and traffic accidents. It then discusses current federal policies affecting these ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Moving to Opportunity or Isolation? Network Effects of a Randomized Housing Lottery in Urban India

By Sharon Barnhardt, Erica Field, and Rohini Pande

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the city's periphery. Fourteen years later, winners report improved housing but no change in tenure security, family income, or human capit...

The Surprising Incidence of Tax Credits for the Toyota Prius

By James M. Sallee

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

This paper estimates the incidence of tax incentives for the Toyota Prius. Transaction microdata indicate that both federal and state incentives were fully captured by consumers. This is surprising because Toyota faced a binding production constraint, whi...

The Computational Experiment: An Econometric Tool

[Symposium: Computational Experiments in Macroeconomics]

By Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

An economic experiment places people in an environment desired by the experimenter, who then records the time paths of their economic behavior. Performing experiments using actual people at the level of national economies is obviously impractical but cons...

Collaborating

By Alessandro Bonatti and Johannes Hörner

American Economic Review, April 2011

This paper examines moral hazard in teams over time. Agents are collectively engaged in a project whose duration and outcome are uncertain, and their individual efforts are unobserved. Free-riding leads not only to a reduction in effort, but also to procr...

Envirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for an Emerging Field

By Michael Greenstone and B. Kelsey Jack

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2015

Environmental quality in many developing countries is poor and generates substantial health and productivity costs. However, the few existing measures of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for environmental quality improvements indicate low valuations by ...

The Boundaries of the Firm Revisited

[Symposium: The Firm and its Boundaries]

By Bengt Holmstrom and John Roberts

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Both transaction cost-economics and property-rights theories offer explanations of the boundaries of the firm based on ideas of ex post bargaining and holdup. These theories are quite distinct in their empirical predictions, but neither offers a satisfact...

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

American Economic Review, July 2016

We explore the consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover the following. First, apart from the land mass and water bodies, split and non-split groups are similar across several dimensions. Second, the i...

Entrepreneurial Taxation with Endogenous Entry

By Florian Scheuer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

I analyze the optimal taxation of profits and labor income under endogenous firm formation. Individuals differ in their skill and cost of setting up a firm, and can become workers or entrepreneurs. A tax system in which profits and labor income are sub...

Commodity Taxes under Fiscal Competition: Stackelberg Equilibrium and Optimality

By You-Qiang Wang

American Economic Review, September 1999

The Effects of Recent Immigration on Racial/Ethnic Labor Market Differentials

By Deborah Reed and Sheldon Danziger

American Economic Review, May 2007

Exchange-Rate Hedging: Financial versus Operational Strategies

By George Allayannis, Jane Ihrig, and James P. Weston

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Effect of Market Structure on Cellular Technology Adoption and Pricing

By Katja Seim and V. Brian Viard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

We examine how structural changes in the mobile telecommunications industry between 1996, when local markets were duopolies, and 1998, when varying degrees of regulated entry had occurred, affected firms' product offerings and nonlinear pricing strategie...

The Effects of an Anti-Grade-Inflation Policy at Wellesley College

[Symposium: Academic Production]

By Kristin F. Butcher, Patrick J. McEwan, and Akila Weerapana

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

Average grades in colleges and universities have risen markedly since the 1960s. Critics express concern that grade inflation erodes incentives for students to learn; gives students, employers, and graduate schools poor information on absolute and relativ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998