How Effective Are Public Policies to Increase Health Insurance Coverage among Young Adults?

By Phillip B. Levine, Robin McKnight, and Samantha Heep

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

This paper assesses the impact of policies to increase insurance coverage for young adults. The introduction of SCHIP in 1997 enabled low-income teens up to age 19 to gain access to public health insurance. More recent policies enabled young adults betwe...

Partner Uncertainty and the Dynamic Boundary of the Firm

By Thomas Hellmann and Veikko Thiele

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

We develop a new theory of the dynamic boundary of the firm where asset owners may want to change partners ex post. We identify a fundamental trade-off between (i) a "displacement externality" under non-integration, where a partner leaves a relationship e...

Access to Credit by Small Businesses: How Relevant Are Race, Ethnicity, and Gender?

By Elizabeth Asiedu, James A. Freeman, and Akwasi Nti-Addae

American Economic Review, May 2012

This paper employs data from the 1998 and 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances to analyze whether, after controlling for observable factors that influence loan decisions, there is a significant difference in the loan approval rate and the interest rate ...

Discounting Inside the Washington D.C. Beltway

By Coleman Bazelon and Kent Smetters

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

This article focuses on how the choice of discount rate can dramatically affect policy choices. These policies include whether to build a bridge, whether to privatize a Power Marketing Administration which sells electricity generated by government-owned f...

Did Expanding the EITC Promote Motherhood?

By Reagan Baughman and Stacy Dickert-Conlin

American Economic Review, May 2003

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States since 1850: Comment

By Michael Hout and Avery M. Guest

American Economic Review, August 2013

We reanalyze Long and Ferrie's data. We find that the association of occupational status across generations was quite similar over time and place. Two significant differences were: (i) American farms in 1880 were far more open to men who had nonfarm backg...

Andreas Steinmayr on how people choose their fields of study

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A little exposure to a new field can make a big difference

Capital Controls with International Reserve Accumulation: Can This Be Optimal?

By Philippe Bacchetta, Kenza Benhima, and Yannick Kalantzis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

Motivated by the Chinese experience, we analyze an economy where the central bank has access to international capital markets, but the private sector does not. The central bank is modeled as a Ramsey planner who can choose the domestic interest rate an...

All-or-Nothing Monitoring: Comment

By Bo Chen

American Economic Review, March 2010

Zhao (2008) presents an interesting "all-or-nothing monitoring" result for a multitask moral hazard agency problem with partial effort observation. We argue that the optimal contract based on the non-verifiable observation of the agent's effort in Zhao (2...

Azhar Iqbal on measuring just how much a recession costs

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The detrimental impacts of a recession can last for years and cost trillions

How Vouchers Could Change the Market for Education

[Symposium: School Vouchers]

By Derek Neal

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

Bruce Weinberg on what makes for transformative science

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Is it true that only young minds can produce game-changing scientific discoveries?

Calebe de Roure on the rise of peer-to-peer lending

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Is online peer lending going to start encroaching on established banks' turf?

Costas Cavounidis on why racial discrimination in the workplace is still around

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Historical discrimination creates a vicious cycle that continues today

Immigrants' Labor Supply and Exchange Rate Volatility

By Arash Nekoei

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Are an immigrant's decisions affected in real time by her home country's economy? I examine this question by exploiting exchange rate variations as exogenous price shocks to immigrants' budget constraints. I find that in response to a 10 percent dollar...

Dan Hamermesh on nonwork during work hours

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Evidence from the American Time Use Survey

Disparities in Wealth Accumulation and Loss from the Great Recession and Beyond

By Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, Eugene Steuerle, and Sisi Zhang

American Economic Review, May 2014

Using over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique, we measure the impact of the Great Recession on US family wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories....

Informal Taxation

By Benjamin A. Olken and Monica Singhal

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Inf...

Sacred versus Pseudo-sacred Values: How People Cope with Taboo Trade-Offs

By Philip E. Tetlock, Barbara A. Mellers, and J. Peter Scoblic

American Economic Review, May 2017

Psychologists have documented widespread public deference to "sacred values" that communities, formally or informally, exempt from tradeoffs with secular limits, like money. This work has, however, been largely confined to low-stakes settings. As the stak...

Are Idle Hands the Devil's Workshop? Incapacitation, Concentration, and Juvenile Crime

By Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren

American Economic Review, December 2003

This paper examines the short-term effect of school on juvenile crime. To do so, we bring together daily measures of criminal activity and detailed school calendar information from 29 jurisdictions across the country, and utilize the plausibly exogenous v...