Surviving Andersonville: The Benefits of Social Networks in POW Camps

By Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn

American Economic Review, September 2007

Twenty-seven percent of the Union Army prisoners captured July 1863 or later died in captivity. At Andersonville, the death rate may have been as high as 40 percent. How did men survive such horrific conditions? Using two independent datasets, we find tha...

The Savers-Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy

By N. Gregory Mankiw

American Economic Review, May 2000

Racial Differences in Transportation Access to Employment in Chicago and Los Angeles, 1980 and 1990

By Chanjin Chung, Samuel L. Myers, and Lisa Saunders

American Economic Review, May 2001

Controlling Health Care Costs through Limited Network Insurance Plans: Evidence from Massachusetts State Employees

By Jonathan Gruber and Robin McKnight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

We investigate the impact of limited network insurance plans in the context of the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC), the insurance plan for state employees. Our quasi-experimental analysis examines the introduction of a major financial in...

Forecasting Gasoline Prices Using Consumer Surveys

By Soren T. Anderson, Ryan Kellogg, James M. Sallee, and Richard T. Curtin

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper analyzes the predictive power of a new data set of consumer gasoline price forecasts taken from the Michigan Survey of Consumers (MSC). MSC data generally perform as well as a no-change forecast in predicting future gasoline prices, and they su...

Policy Watch: Medicaid and Uninsured Women and Children

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

This paper focuses on the role of Medicaid, the public health insurance program for low income populations, as a means of reducing uninsurance among uninsured women and children. The author discusses the structure of the Medicaid program and recent findin...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Review, May 2011

The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior

By Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

This paper explores the importance of the home and school environments in explaining the gender gap in disruptive behavior. We document large differences in the gender gap across key features of the home environment -- boys do especially poorly in broke...

Linking Numerical and Analytical Models of Carbon Leakage

By Jared C. Carbone

American Economic Review, May 2013

I use an applied general equilibrium model to quantify the influence of a new, theoretical channel for carbon leakage effects, as identified by Fullerton, Karney and Baylis (2012). I first produce parameterizations of the model that generate a close corre...

Changes in Earnings Inequality: The Role of Demand Shifts

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By George E. Johnson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

That the relative demand for labor in the upper segment of the skill distribution has been shifting is a widely accepted 'stylized fact' in the literature on the increase in earnings inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s. Explanations of the c...

Do Social Connections Reduce Moral Hazard? Evidence from the New York City Taxi Industry

By C. Kirabo Jackson and Henry S. Schneider

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

This study investigates the role of social networks in aligning the incentives of agents in settings with incomplete contracts. Specifically, the study examines the New York City taxi industry where taxis are often leased and lessee-drivers have worse dri...

Using Student Performance Data to Identify Effective Classroom Practices

By John H. Tyler, Eric S. Taylor, Thomas J. Kane, and Amy L. Wooten

American Economic Review, May 2010

Higher-Education Policies and the College Wage Premium: Cross-State Evidence from the 1990s

By Nicole M. Fortin

American Economic Review, September 2006

Exploiting differences across U.S. states, this paper demonstrates that there is a tight link between higher education policies, past enrollment rates, and recent changes in the college wage premium among labor market entrants. The analysis reveals, ho...

Real Business Cycle Views of the Great Depression and Recent Events: A Review of Timothy J. Kehoe and Edward C. Prescott's Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century

By Peter Temin

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

This book collects essays, most of which were published earlier, into an advertisement for real business cycle (RBC) analysis. Half of the essays discuss the Great Depression; half discuss events of the 1980s and 1990s. They all use the general equilibr...

Crossing Party Lines: The Effects of Information on Redistributive Politics

By Katherine Casey

American Economic Review, August 2015

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candi...

Pareto-Improving Social Security Reform when Financial Markets are Incomplete!?

By Dirk Krueger and Felix Kubler

American Economic Review, June 2006

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with stochastic production and incomplete markets to assess whether the introduction of an unfunded social security system leads to a Pareto improvement. When returns to capital and wages are imperfec...

Discrimination in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Beyond Market Interactions

[Symposium: Discrimination in Product, Credit and Labor Markets]

By Glenn C. Loury

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

This comment argues that discrimination against blacks remains important, especially in labor markets, but that its extent is modest both by historical standards and in relation to supply-side racial disparities. It contends that the racial skills gap is ...

The Returns to Currency Speculation in Emerging Markets

By Craig Burnside, Martin Eichenbaum, and Sergio Rebelo

American Economic Review, May 2007

Pricing to Habits and the Law of One Price

By Morten O. Ravn, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, and Martín Uribe

American Economic Review, May 2007

Playing the Admissions Game: Student Reactions to Increasing College Competition

[Symposium: College Admissions]

By John Bound, Brad Hershbein, and Bridget Terry Long

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

Gaining entrance to a four-year college or university, particularly a selective institution, has become increasingly competitive over the last several decades. We document this phenomenon and show how it has varied across different parts of the student ab...