Are Information Disclosures Effective? Evidence from the Credit Card Market

By Enrique Seira, Alan Elizondo, and Eduardo Laguna-Müggenburg

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on government agendas, even though there is little evidence of its effectiveness. We implement a randomized control trial in the credit card market for a large populati...

The Effects of High Stakes High School Achievement Awards: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Joshua Angrist and Victor Lavy

American Economic Review, September 2009

The Israeli matriculation certificate is a prerequisite for most postsecondary schooling. In a randomized trial, we attempted to increase certification rates among low-achievers with cash incentives. The experiment used a school-based randomization des...

Why Was the Arab World Poised for Revolution? Schooling, Economic Opportunities, and the Arab Spring

By Filipe R. Campante and Davin Chor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

What underlying long-term conditions set the stage for the Arab Spring? In recent decades, the Arab region has been characterized by an expansion in schooling coupled with weak labor market conditions. This pattern is especially pronounced in those countr...

Requiem for the Representative Consumer? Aggregate Implications of Microeconomic Consumption Behavior

By Christopher D. Carroll

American Economic Review, May 2000

Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm

By Eric Van den Steen

American Economic Review, March 2010

This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm's centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give the manager, as an equilibrium outcome, interpersonal authority over employees (in a world with open disagreement). The paper thus pr...

Fluctuations in Uncertainty

By Nicholas Bloom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Uncertainty is an amorphous concept. It reflects uncertainty in the minds of consumers, managers, and policymakers about possible futures. It is also a broad concept, including uncertainty over the path of macro phenomena like GDP growth, micro phenomena ...

Costs of Reducing Global Carbon Emissions

[Symposium]

By John P. Weyant

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

Projecting the costs of reducing carbon emissions is extremely important, and exceedingly difficult. Such projections are an integral component of cost-benefit analyses of alternative policies in response to climate change. This paper first discusses the ...

Nonmarket Institutions for Credit and Risk Sharing in Low-Income Countries

[Symposium: Consumption Smoothing in Developing Countries]

By Timothy Besley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

The design credit and risk institutions in low-income countries provides one of the most exciting testing grounds for theories of contracting with imperfect information and limited enforcement. This paper reviews some of the recent literature, with a spec...

Information Aggregation in Standing and Ad Hoc Committees

By S. Nageeb Ali, Jacob K. Goeree, Navin Kartik, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Review, May 2008

Industry Evidence on the Effects of Government Spending

By Christopher J. Nekarda and Valerie A. Ramey

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

This paper investigates the effects of government purchases at the industry level in order to shed light on the transmission mechanism for government spending on the aggregate economy. We create a new panel dataset that matches output and labor variables ...

Information and the Coase Theorem

By Joseph Farrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

Some economists think the Coase theorem implies a lot about the proper scope of government intervention in the economy and about the welfare consequences of laissez-faire. Others see it as a mere tautology: that if people negotiate efficiently then every ...

New Evidence on the Returns to Job Skills

By Katharine G. Abraham and James R. Spletzer

American Economic Review, May 2009

What Accounts for the Variation in Retirement Wealth among U.S. Households?

By B. Douglas Bernheim, Jonathan Skinner, and Steven Weinberg

American Economic Review, September 2001

Even among households with similar socioeconomic characteristics, saving and wealth vary considerably. Life-cycle models attribute this variation to differences in time preference rates, risk tolerance, exposure to uncertainty, relative tastes for work an...

The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures

By Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

In recent years, most states have constructed elaborate accountability systems using school-level test scores. However, because the median elementary school contains only 69 children per grade level, such measures are quite imprecise. We evaluate the impl...

Another Look at the Impacts of Health Reform in Massachusetts: Evidence Using New Data and a Stronger Model

By Sharon K. Long, Karen Stockley, and Alshadye Yemane

American Economic Review, May 2009

Falsifiability

By Wojciech Olszewski and Alvaro Sandroni

American Economic Review, April 2011

We examine Popper's falsifiability within an economic model in which a tester hires a potential expert to produce a theory. Payments are contingent on the performance of the theory vis-à-vis data. We show that if experts are strategic, falsifiabili...

Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico: Using a Social Experiment to Validate a Dynamic Behavioral Model of Child Schooling and Fertility

By Petra E. Todd and Kenneth I. Wolpin

American Economic Review, December 2006

This paper uses data from a randomized social experiment in Mexico to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling, to evaluate the effects of the PROGRESA school subsidy program, and to per...

The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

The U.S. mortgage before the 1930s would be nearly unrecognizable today: it featured variable interest rates, high down payments and short maturities. The authors compare the form of U.S. home mortgages today with those in other countries. The U.S. mortga...

Has Government Investment Crowded Out Private Investment in India?

By Pritha Mitra

American Economic Review, May 2006

Retrospectives: American Economists in the Progressive Era on the Minimum Wage

By Robert E. Prasch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

Beginning in 1912, a number of states passed minimum wage legislation that applied exclusively to women and minors. These tentative experiments in economic legislation ended in 1923 when the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia's minimum wage...