Financial Factors in the Great Depression

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Charles W. Calomiris

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Macroeconomists have long argued that financial markets were important sources and propagators of decline during the Great Depression. Turning points during the Depression often coincided with or were preceded by dramatic events in financial markets: stoc...

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments

By J. Michelle Brock, Andreas Lange, and Erkut Y. Ozbay

American Economic Review, February 2013

We study if and how social preferences extend to risky environments. We provide experimental evidence from different versions of dictator games with risky outcomes and establish that preferences that are exclusively based on ex post or on ex ante compa...

The Role of Connections in Academic Promotions

By Natalia Zinovyeva and Manuel Bagues

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

This paper analyzes how evaluators' private information and subjective biases affect evaluations in academia. We use evidence from centralized selection exams in Spain, where evaluators are randomly assigned to promotion committees. Candidates are signifi...

Testing Paternalism: Cash versus In-Kind Transfers

By Jesse M. Cunha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. This paper tests whether such paternalistically motivated transfers are justified compared to cash, using a randomized controlled trial ...

Symposium on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Frederic S. Mishkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Understanding of monetary transmission mechanisms is crucial to answering a broad range of questions. These transmission mechanisms include interest-rate effects, exchange-rate effects, other asset price effects, and the so-called credit channel. This int...

Biological Measures of the Standard of Living

By Richard H. Steckel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

When economists investigate long-term trends and socioeconomic differences in the standard of living or quality of life, they have traditionally focused on monetary measures such as gross domestic product -- which has occupied center stage for over 50 yea...

Narrow Bracketing and Dominated Choices

By Matthew Rabin and Georg Weizsäcker

American Economic Review, September 2009

We show that any decision maker who "narrowly brackets" (evaluates decisions separately) and does not have constant-absolute-risk-averse preferences will make a first-order stochastically dominated combined choice in some simple pair of independent bin...

Do Consumers React to Anticipated Income Changes? Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund

By Chang-Tai Hsieh

American Economic Review, March 2003

Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically

[Symposium: Motivated Beliefs]

By Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton, and Roberto A. Weber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Research yields ample evidence that individual's behavior often reflects an apparent concern for moral considerations. A natural way to interpret evidence of such motives using an economic framework is to add an argument to the utility function such that ...

Directed Search on the Job, Heterogeneity, and Aggregate Fluctuations

By Guido Menzio and Shouyong Shi

American Economic Review, May 2010

Symposium on Globalization in Perspective: An Introduction

[Symposium: Globalization in Perspective]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The benefits of international economic integration come with strings attached: international markets get greater say about the way national economies are managed and their wealth is distributed. The papers in the symposium that follow address these questi...

The Good News-Bad News Effect: Asymmetric Processing of Objective Information about Yourself

By David Eil and Justin M. Rao

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

We study processing and acquisition of objective information regarding qualities that people care about, intelligence and beauty. Subjects receiving negative feedback did not respect the strength of these signals, were far less predictable in their updati...

Multiproduct Search and the Joint Search Effect

By Jidong Zhou

American Economic Review, September 2014

This paper presents a sequential search model where consumers look for several products from multiproduct firms. Multiproduct search can significantly influence firms' pricing decisions. For example, it can make market prices decrease with search costs. P...

Household Expenditure and the Income Tax Rebates of 2001

By David S. Johnson, Jonathan A. Parker, and Nicholas S. Souleles

American Economic Review, December 2006

Using questions expressly added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we estimate the change in consumption expenditures caused by the 2001 federal income tax rebates and test the permanent income hypothesis. We exploit the unique, randomized timing of r...

Fertility Transitions along the Extensive and Intensive Margins

By Daniel Aaronson, Fabian Lange, and Bhashkar Mazumder

American Economic Review, November 2014

By allowing for an extensive margin in the standard quantity-quality model, we generate new insights into fertility transitions. We test the model on Southern black women aected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, wom...

Life and Death in the Fast Lane: Police Enforcement and Traffic Fatalities

By Gregory DeAngelo and Benjamin Hansen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

Simultaneity complicates the estimation of the causal effect of police on crime. We overcome this obstacle by focusing on a mass layoff of Oregon State Police in February of 2003. Due solely to budget cuts, 35 percent of the roadway troopers were laid ...

Trends in Earnings Differentials across College Majors and the Changing Task Composition of Jobs

By Joseph G. Altonji, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jamin D. Speer

American Economic Review, May 2014

We show that, among college graduates, earnings differentials across field of study have increased substantially since the early 1990s. We study the degree to which this increase can be accounted for by changes in the labor market return to skills associa...

How to Control Controlled School Choice

By Federico Echenique and M. Bumin Yenmez

American Economic Review, August 2015

We characterize choice rules for schools that regard students as substitutes while expressing preferences for a diverse student body. The stable (or fair) assignment of students to schools requires the latter to regard the former as substitutes. Such a re...

Economic Choices

By Daniel McFadden

American Economic Review, June 2001

Restoring Rational Choice: The Challenge of Consumer Financial Regulation

By John Y. Campbell

American Economic Review, May 2016

This lecture considers the case for consumer financial regulation in an environment where many households lack the knowledge to manage their financial affairs effectively. The lecture argues that financial ignorance is pervasive and unsurprising given the...