Placebo Reforms

By Ran Spiegler

American Economic Review, June 2013

I study a dynamic model of strategic reform decisions that potentially affect the stochastic evolution of a publicly observed economic variable. Policy makers maximize their evaluation by a boundedly rational public. Specifically, the public follows a rul...

Home Equity Lending and Retail Spending: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Texas

By Chadi S. Abdallah and William D. Lastrapes

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

We estimate how spending in Texas responded to a 1997 constitutional amendment that relaxed severe restrictions on home equity lending. We use this event as a natural experiment to estimate the importance of credit constraints. If households are credit-...

Naked Exclusion: An Experimental Study of Contracts with Externalities

By Claudia M. Landeo and Kathryn E. Spier

American Economic Review, December 2009

This paper reports the results of an experiment on exclusive contracts. We replicate the strategic environment described by Rasmusen, Ramseyer, and Wiley (1991) and Segal and Whinston (2000). Our findings are as follows. First, when the buyers can comm...

Repeated Interaction and Rating Inflation: A Model of Double Reputation

By Sivan Frenkel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Credit rating agencies have an incentive to maintain a public reputation for credibility among investors but also have an incentive to develop a second, private reputation for leniency among issuers. We show that in markets with few issuers, such as marke...

Diagnostics before Prescription

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

Development economists should stop acting as categorical advocates (or detractors) for specific approaches to development. They should instead be diagnosticians, helping decisionmakers choose the right model (and remedy) for their specific realities, amon...

Optimal Inflation Targets, "Conservative" Central Banks, and Linear Inflation Contracts: Comment

By Roel M. W. J. Beetsma and Henrik Jensen

American Economic Review, March 1999

The Impact of Unexpected Maternal Death on Education: First Evidence from Three National Administrative Data Links

By Stacey H. Chen, Yen-Chien Chen, and Jin-Tan Liu

American Economic Review, May 2009

Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness

By David J. Deming

American Economic Review, May 2014

Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness. Yet, random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of VAMs and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools. In this pap...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2015

Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts

By Juan J. Cruces and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

A main puzzle in the sovereign debt literature is that defaults have only minor effects on subsequent borrowing costs and access to credit. This paper comes to a different conclusion. We construct the first complete database of investor losses ("haircu...

The Quality of Medical Advice in Low-Income Countries

[Symposium: Development]

By Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, and Kenneth Leonard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

This paper documents the quality of medical advice in low-income countries. Our evidence on health care quality in low-income countries is drawn primarily from studies in four countries: Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and Paraguay. We provide an overview of...

Fact-Free Learning

By Enriqueta Aragones, Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler

American Economic Review, December 2005

People may be surprised to notice certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We...

The Quantitative Role of Capital Goods Imports in US Growth

By Michele Cavallo and Anthony Landry

American Economic Review, May 2010

Mergers and Sunk Costs: An Application to the Ready-Mix Concrete Industry

By Allan Collard-Wexler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

Horizontal mergers have a large impact by inducing a long-lasting change in market structure. Only in an industry with substantial entry barriers is a merger not immediately counteracted by post-merger entry. To evaluate the duration of the effects of a...

Geographic Variation in the Gender Differences in Test Scores

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Devin G. Pope and Justin R. Sydnor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The causes and consequences of gender disparities in standardized test scores -- especially in the high tails of achievement -- have been a topic of heated debate. The existing evidence on standardized test scores largely confirms the prevailing stereoty...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

The Flow Approach to Labor Markets: New Data Sources and Micro-Macro Links

[Symposium: American Employment]

By Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John Haltiwanger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8 percent of employment per quarte...

The IBM and Microsoft Cases: What's the Difference?

By Franklin M. Fisher

American Economic Review, May 2000

A Procurement Auction for Toxic Assets with Asymmetric Information

By Olivier Armantier, Charles A. Holt, and Charles R. Plott

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2013

The proposed 2008 TARP auction was intended to remove "toxic" assets from portfolios of financially stressed banks. The Treasury selected a design whereby bids to sell different securities would be normalized by "reference prices" that reflect relative...