Trade Shocks and Labor Adjustment: A Structural Empirical Approach

By Erhan Artuç, Shubham Chaudhuri, and John McLaren

American Economic Review, June 2010

The welfare effects of trade shocks turn on the nature and magnitude of the costs workers face in moving between sectors. Using an Euler-type equilibrium condition derived from a rational expectations model of dynamic labor adjustment, we estimate the m...

Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization

By Paul A. Samuelson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

Autarky real per capita well being, does not deny that new technical Chinese progress in goods that America previously had competitive advantage in can, ceteris paribus, lower permanently measurable per capita U.S. real income. Nor does it deny that techn...

Agriculture in the Global Economy

[Symposium: Agriculture]

By Julian M. Alston and Philip G. Pardey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

The past 50-100 years have witnessed dramatic changes in agricultural production and productivity, driven to a great extent by public and private investments in agricultural research, with profound implications especially for the world's poor. In this a...

Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling

By Melvin Stephens Jr. and Dou-Yan Yang

American Economic Review, June 2014

Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using U.S. state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes acro...

"We Thinking" and Its Consequences

By Robert Akerlof

American Economic Review, May 2016

Increasingly, economists are drawing on concepts from outside economics--such as "norms," "esteem," and "identity"--to model agents' social natures. A key reason for studying such social motivation is to shed light on the conditions that facilitate--or de...

The SO₂ Allowance Trading System: The Ironic History of a Grand Policy Experiment

[Symposium: Trading Pollution Permits]

By Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies: First, by creating ...

Exchange Rates, Interest Rates, and the Risk Premium

By Charles Engel

American Economic Review, February 2016

The uncovered interest parity puzzle concerns the empirical regularity that high interest rate countries tend to have high expected returns on short term deposits. A separate puzzle is that high real interest rate countries tend to have currencies that ar...

The Role of Social Capital in Financial Development

By Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales

American Economic Review, June 2004

To identify the effect of social capital on financial development, we exploit social capital differences within Italy. In high-social-capital areas, households are more likely to use checks, invest less in cash and more in stock, have higher access to ins...

The Econometrics of Kinked Budget Constraints

By Robert Moffitt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

In the last several years, a branch of applied econometrics has developed that is devoted to the development of techniques for the estimation of demand and other functions when the budget constraint is "piecewise-linear,+ or "kinky"—that is, when th...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

Towards a Political Theory of the Firm

[Symposium: The Modern Corporation]

By Luigi Zingales

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

The revenues of large companies often rival those of national governments, and some companies have annual revenues higher than many national governments. Among the largest corporations in 2015, some had private security forces that rivaled the best secret...

When Do Capital Inflow Surges End in Tears?

By Atish R. Ghosh, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Mahvash S. Qureshi

American Economic Review, May 2016

We investigate in a sample of 53 emerging markets over 1980-2014 whether countries with open capital accounts are necessarily at the mercy of global events, or are able to take policy actions when receiving inflows to mitigate the impact of a subsequent r...

An Essay on Fiscal Federalism

By Wallace E. Oates

Journal of Economic Literature, September 1999

This paper is a selective survey of fiscal federalism. It begins with a brief review and some reflections on the traditional theory of fiscal federalism: the assignment of functions to levels of government, the welfare gains from fiscal decentralization, ...

The Great Recession: Lessons from Microeconomic Data

By Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

American Economic Review, May 2010

Success and Failure of Reform: Insights from the Transition of Agriculture

By Scott Rozelle and Johan F.M. Swinnen

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2004

The paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance. We focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes, fundamental differences among countries, and relative simplicity of agr...

Partner Choice, Investment in Children, and the Marital College Premium

By Pierre-André Chiappori, Bernard Salanié, and Yoram Weiss

American Economic Review, August 2017

We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depends on their human capital, which depends on the time their parents spend with them and on the...

Beeps

By Jeffrey C. Ely

American Economic Review, January 2017

I introduce and study dynamic persuasion mechanisms. A principal privately observes the evolution of a stochastic process and sends messages over time to an agent. The agent takes actions in each period based on her beliefs about the state of the process ...

Learning to Cope: Voluntary Financial Education and Loan Performance during a Housing Crisis

By Sumit Agarwal, Gene Amromin, Itzhak Ben-David, Souphala Chomsisengphet, and Douglas D. Evanoff

American Economic Review, May 2010

History and the Sizes of Cities

By Hoyt Bleakley and Jeffrey Lin

American Economic Review, May 2015

We contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes. Recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical advantages suggests that path dependence cannot be understood as the m...