Classroom Games: Information Cascades

By Lisa R. Anderson and Charles A. Holt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

This paper describes how to set up a classroom exercise in which students see private signals and make public decisions in sequence. A pattern of conforming decisions in this context is called an information cascade. Once a cascade starts, it is rational ...

Missing Gains from Trade?

By Marc J. Melitz and Stephen J. Redding

American Economic Review, May 2014

In a class of trade models which satisfy a constant elasticity gravity equation, the welfare gains from trade can be computed using the open economy domestic trade share and a constant trade elasticity. The measured welfare gains from trade from this quan...

Wholesalers and Retailers in US Trade

By Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, May 2010

Life Insurance and Household Consumption

By Jay H. Hong and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull

American Economic Review, December 2012

Using life insurance holdings by age, sex, and marital status, we infer how individuals value consumption in different demographic stages. We estimate equivalence scales and bequest motives simultaneously within a fully specified model where agents face U...

Correspondence

By Nancy J. Barrett and Ines Bustillo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

Correspondence regarding: Symposium on the Slowdown in Productivity Growth Choice under Uncertainty: Problems Solved and Unsolved Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game

Internet Job Search and Unemployment Durations

By Peter Kuhn and Mikal Skuterud

American Economic Review, March 2004

Using the December 1998 and August 2000 CPS Computer and Internet Supplements matched with subsequent CPS files, we ask which types of unemployed workers looked for work on line and whether Internet searchers became reemployed more quickly. In our data, I...

Decentralization of Governance and Development

By Pranab Bardhan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

In this paper we note that the institutional context (and therefore the structure of incentives and organization) in developing and transition economies is quite different from those in advanced industrial economies, and this necessitates the literature o...

The Relationship between Economic Status and Child Health: Evidence from the United States

By Simon Condliffe and Charles R. Link

American Economic Review, September 2008

Anne Case et al. (2002), using cross-sectional data, found a positive relationship between children's health and income, with income's protective effect increasing with age. Janet Currie and Mark Stabile (2003), using a panel of Canadian children, foun...

Student Loans: Do College Students Borrow Too Much--Or Not Enough?

[Symposium: Higher Education]

By Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Total student loan debt rose to over $800 billion in June 2010, overtaking total credit card debt outstanding for the first time. By the time this article sees print, the continually updated Student Loan Debt Clock will show an accumulated total of roughl...

Check in the Mail or More in the Paycheck: Does the Effectiveness of Fiscal Stimulus Depend on How It Is Delivered?

By Claudia R. Sahm, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Joel Slemrod

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

Recent fiscal policies, including the 2008 stimulus payments and the 2009 Making Work Pay Tax Credit, aimed to increase household spending. This paper quantifies the spending response to these policies and examines differences in spending by whether the s...

The Growth Potential of Startups over the Business Cycle

By Petr Sedláček and Vincent Sterk

American Economic Review, October 2017

This paper shows that employment in cohorts of US firms is strongly influenced by aggregate conditions at the time of their entry. Employment fluctuations of startups are procyclical, they persist into later years, and cohort-level employment variations a...

Firm-Related Risk and Precautionary Saving Response

By Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, May 2017

We propose a new approach to identify the strength of the precautionary motive and the extent of self-insurance in response to earnings risk based on Euler equation estimates. To address endogeneity problems, we use Norwegian administrative data and instr...

Sanitation and Education

By Anjali Adukia

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

I explore whether the absence of school sanitation infrastructure impedes educational attainment, particularly among pubescent-age girls, using a national Indian school latrine construction initiative and administrative school-level data. School latrine c...

Taxes and Time Use: Fiscal Policy in a Household Production Model

By Kelly S. Ragan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Time use data on work and leisure is presented for a broad group of OECD countries. The home production model explicitly accounts for taxes and public expenditures on day care and elder care, substitutes for work households perform at home. Taxes are im...

Reference Prices, Costs, and Nominal Rigidities

By Martin Eichenbaum, Nir Jaimovich, and Sergio Rebelo

American Economic Review, February 2011

We assess the importance of nominal rigidities using a new weekly scanner dataset. We find that nominal rigidities take the form of inertia in reference prices and costs, defined as the most common prices and costs within a given quarter. Reference price...

Matthew Gentzkow, Winner of the 2014 Clark Medal

By Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

The 2014 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The citation recognized Matt's "fundamental contributions to our understanding of the economic fo...

Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects

By Charles A. Holt and Susan K. Laury

American Economic Review, December 2002

Internet Penetration and Capacity Utilization in the US Airline Industry

By James D. Dana Jr. and Eugene Orlov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

Airline capacity utilization increased dramatically between 1993 and 2007, after staying fairly level following deregulation. We argue that consumers' use of the Internet to investigate and purchase airline tickets reduces market frictions and allows a...

Global Cycles: Capital Flows, Commodities, and Sovereign Defaults, 1815-2015

By Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Review, May 2016

Capital flow and commodity cycles have long been connected with economic crises. Sparse historical data, however, has made it difficult to connect their timing. We date turning points in global capital flows and commodity prices across two centuries and p...

Market Size, Competition, and the Product Mix of Exporters

By Thierry Mayer, Marc J. Melitz, and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

American Economic Review, February 2014

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how competition across market destinations affects both a firm's exported product range and product mix. We show how tougher competition in an export market induces a firm to skew its ...