Devolution, Grants, and Fiscal Competition

[Symposium: Fiscal Federalism]

By Richard A. Musgrave

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

Following half a century of fiscal activism and federal leadership, the call now is for downsizing the federal budget and a devolution of fiscal responsibilities to states and localities. The call for "federalism," meant to secure a stronger center in Jam...

Killer Cities: Past and Present

By W. Walker Hanlon and Yuan Tian

American Economic Review, May 2015

The industrial cities of the 19th century were incredibly unhealthy places to live. How much progress has been made in reducing these negative health effects over the past 150 years? To help answer this question, we compare mortality patterns in 19th cent...

Delivering Public Health Insurance through Private Plan Choice in the United States

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

The United States has seen a sea change in the way that publicly financed health insurance coverage is provided to low-income, elderly, and disabled enrollees. When programs such as Medicare and Medicaid were introduced in the 1960s, the government dire...

The Effect of Income on Religiousness

By Thomas Buser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

How does income affect religiousness? Using self-collected survey data, we estimate the effects of income on religious behavior. As a source of exogenous income variation we use a change in the eligibility criteria for a government cash transfer in Ecuado...

Change, Consolidation, and Competition in Health Care Markets

By Martin Gaynor and Deborah Haas-Wilson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

In this paper, the authors summarize the nature of the changes in the structure of the health-care industry. They focus on the markets for health insurance, hospital services, and physician services. They discuss the potential implications of the restruct...

Disasters and the Welfare Cost of Uncertainty

By Ian W. R. Martin

American Economic Review, May 2008

A Theory of Deception

By David Ettinger and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

This paper proposes an equilibrium approach to belief manipulation and deception in which agents only have coarse knowledge of their opponent's strategy. Equilibrium requires the coarse knowledge available to agents to be correct, and the inferences an...

Overconfidence in Political Behavior

By Pietro Ortoleva and Erik Snowberg

American Economic Review, February 2015

This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the role of overconfidence in political behavior. Our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger partisan ide...

World Income Components: Measuring and Exploiting Risk-Sharing Opportunities

By Stefano G. Athanasoulis and Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, September 2001

A method is constructed for decomposing the variance of changes in incomes in the world into components, to indicate the most important risk-sharing opportunities among people of the world. A constant absolute risk premium (CARP) model, an intertemporal g...

The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Ethnic Stratification in Africa

By Warren Whatley and Rob Gillezeau

American Economic Review, May 2011

In the last 15 years, economists and economic historians have argued that Africa has undergone a "reversal of fortune" and that ethnic fragmentation is a significant cause of Africa's underdevelopment. In this article, we join these narratives by arguing ...

Debt Relief and the International Enforcement of Loan Contracts

[Symposium: New Institutions for Developing Country Debt]

By Jonathan Eaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

It is now apparent that the governments of many developing countries will not repay their debts as initially contracted. Creditors and creditor governments must now adjust to the realization that full repayment is either infeasible or that enforcing full ...

Diagnosing Consumer Confusion and Sub-optimal Shopping Effort: Theory and Mortgage-Market Evidence

By Susan E. Woodward and Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, December 2012

Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to...

Networks, Markets, and Inequality

By Julien Gagnon and Sanjeev Goyal

American Economic Review, January 2017

The interaction between community and markets remains a central theme in the social sciences. The empirical evidence is rich: in some instances, markets strengthen social ties, while in others they undermine them. The impact of markets on inequality and w...

The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography

By Paul Krugman

American Economic Review, June 2009

Thirty years have passed since a small group of theorists began applying concepts and tools from industrial organization to the analysis of international trade. The new models of trade that emerged from that work didn't supplant traditional trade theory...

The Road to Price Stability

By Athanasios Orphanides

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Case for Randomized Field Trials in Economic and Policy Research

[Symposium: Social Experiments]

By Gary Burtless

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

Social experiments have been used in research since the 1960s, yet the technique of controlled experimentation still arouses controversy among social scientists. The crucial element that distinguishes a controlled experiment from other forms of research i...

Frontiers of Real-Time Data Analysis

By Dean Croushore

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

In the past ten years, researchers have explored the impact of data revisions in many different contexts. Researchers have examined the properties of data revisions, how structural modeling is affected by data revisions, how data revisions affect forecas...

Human Resources from an Organizational Behavior Perspective: Some Paradoxes Explained

[Symposium: Human Resource Management]

By Jeffrey Pfeffer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

Workplaces in America and elsewhere show pervasive job dissatisfaction, distrust, and disengagement, with the evidence suggesting that these problems are getting worse and have a number of negative consequences for employers as well as employees. What fol...

Betting on Secession: Quantifying Political Events Surrounding Slavery and the Civil War

By Charles W. Calomiris and Jonathan Pritchett

American Economic Review, January 2016

Lincoln's election produced Southern secession, war, and abolition. Using a new dataset on slave sales, we examine connections between news and slave prices for the period 1856-1861. By August 1861, slave prices had declined by roughly one-third from thei...

Elephants

By Michael Kremer and Charles Morcom

American Economic Review, March 2000

Many open-access resources, such as elephants, are used to produce storable goods. Anticipated future scarcity of these resources will increase current prices and poaching. This implies that, for given initial conditions, there may be rational expectation...