Sovereign Debt as Intertemporal Barter

By Kenneth M. Kletzer and Brian D. Wright

American Economic Review, June 2000

Tax Expenditures for Owner-Occupied Housing: Deductions for Property Taxes and Mortgage Interest and the Exclusion of Imputed Rental Income

By James Poterba and Todd Sinai

American Economic Review, May 2008

A Study of the Internal Organization of a Bidding Cartel

By John Asker

American Economic Review, June 2010

This paper examines bidding in over 1,700 knockout auctions used by a bidding cartel (or ring) of stamp dealers in the 1990s. The knockout was conducted using a variant of the model studied by Daniel Graham, Robert Marshall, and Jean-Francois Richard (199...

The Labor Market Returns to Cognitive and Noncognitive Ability: Evidence from the Swedish Enlistment

By Erik Lindqvist and Roine Vestman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We use data from the Swedish military enlistment to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of noncognitive ability is based on a personal interview conducted by a psychologist. We find strong evi...

The New Economics of Equilibrium Sorting and Policy Evaluation Using Housing Markets

By Nicolai V. Kuminoff, V. Kerry Smith, and Christopher Timmins

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2013

Households "sort" across neighborhoods according to their wealth and their preferences for public goods, social characteristics, and commuting opportunities. The aggregation of these individual choices in markets and in other institutions influences th...

The Unequal Effects of Liberalization: Evidence from Dismantling the License Raj in India

By Philippe Aghion, Robin Burgess, Stephen J. Redding, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, September 2008

We study whether the effects on registered manufacturing output of dismantling the License Raj—a system of central controls regulating entry and production activity in this sector—vary across Indian states with different labor market regula...

Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from WID.world

By Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We obse...

A Structural Model of the Retail Market for Illicit Drugs

By Manolis Galenianos and Alessandro Gavazza

American Economic Review, March 2017

We estimate a model of illicit drugs markets using data on purchases of crack cocaine. Buyers are searching for high-quality drugs, but they determine drugs' quality (i.e., their purity) only after consuming them. Hence, sellers can rip off first-time buy...

The Changing Consequences of Attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

Using nationally representative data files from 1970s and 1990s college attendees, we find that in the 1970s matriculation at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) was associated with higher wages and an increased probability of graduati...

Moving to Higher Ground: Migration Response to Natural Disasters in the Early Twentieth Century

By Leah Platt Boustan, Matthew E. Kahn, and Paul W. Rhode

American Economic Review, May 2012

Areas differ in their propensity to experience natural disasters. Exposure to disaster risks can be reduced either through migration (i.e., self-protection) or through public infrastructure investment (e.g., building seawalls). Using migration data from t...

The Fed and Interest Rates - A High-Frequency Identification

By John H. Cochrane and Monika Piazzesi

American Economic Review, May 2002

The Heterogeneous Geographic and Socioeconomic Incidence of Cigarette Taxes: Evidence from Nielsen Homescan Data

By Matthew Harding, Ephraim Leibtag, and Michael F. Lovenheim

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

We use Nielsen Homescan data to examine who bears the economic burden of cigarette taxes. We find cigarette taxes are less than fully passed through to consumer prices, suggesting consumers and producers split the excess burden of these taxes. Using infor...

Disability Insurance and the Dynamics of the Incentive Insurance Trade-Off

By Hamish Low and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, October 2015

We provide a life-cycle framework for comparing insurance and disincentive effects of disability benefits. The risks that individuals face and the parameters of the Disability Insurance (DI) program are estimated from consumption, health, disability insur...

The Substitution Elasticity, Factor Shares, and the Low-Frequency Panel Model

By Robert S. Chirinko and Debdulal Mallick

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2017

The value of the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital (σ) is a crucial assumption in understanding the secular decline in the labor share of income. This paper develops and implements a new strategy for estimating this crucial parame...

Promoting Recycling: Private Values, Social Norms, and Economic Incentives

By W. Kip Viscusi, Joel Huber, and Jason Bell

American Economic Review, May 2011

Evidence from a nationally representative sample of households illuminates the determinants of recycling behavior for plastic water bottles. Private values of the environment are influential in promoting recycling, as are personal norms for pro-environmen...

US Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future

[Symposium: Manufacturing]

By Martin Neil Baily and Barry P. Bosworth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

The development of the US manufacturing sector over the last half-century displays two striking and somewhat contradictory features: 1) the growth of real output in the US manufacturing sector, measured by real value added, has equaled or exceeded that ...

Can Development Aid Contribute to Social Cohesion after Civil War? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Post-conflict Liberia

By James D. Fearon, Macartan Humphreys, and Jeremy M. Weinstein

American Economic Review, May 2009

A Rational Expectations Approach to Hedonic Price Regressions with Time-Varying Unobserved Product Attributes: The Price of Pollution

By Patrick Bajari, Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, Kyoo il Kim, and Christopher Timmins

American Economic Review, August 2012

We propose a new strategy for a pervasive problem in the hedonics literature: recovering hedonic prices in the presence of time-varying correlated unobservables. Our approach relies on an assumption about home buyer rationality, under which prior sales pr...

Services as Experience Goods: An Empirical Examination of Consumer Learning in Automobile Insurance

By Mark Israel

American Economic Review, December 2005

Theoretical work on experience goods sets out three empirical questions. How accurate is information at initial purchase? How rapidly do consumers learn from product experiences? And how much impact does learning have on purchase decisions? I answer these...

The Rise and Decay of the Socialist Economy in Bulgaria

By Marvin Jackson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

The political reconstruction of Bulgaria has gone on more slowly than in Central Europe, but the role of the former communists is weaker than in neighboring Romania or Serbia and, of course, much more so than in the Soviet Union (except for the Baltic Rep...