Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability?

By Thomas Dohmen, Armin Falk, David Huffman, and Uwe Sunde

American Economic Review, June 2010

This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of roughly 1,000 German adults. Subjects participate in choice experiments with monetary incentives measuring risk aver...

Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance

[Symposium: Computers and Productivity]

By Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

To understand the economic value of computers, one must broaden the traditional definition of both the technology and its effects. Case studies and firm-level econometric evidence suggest that: 1) organizational "investments" have a large influence on the...

No Taxation without Information: Deterrence and Self-Enforcement in the Value Added Tax

By Dina Pomeranz

American Economic Review, August 2015

Claims that the VAT facilitates tax enforcement by generating paper trails on transactions between firms contributed to widespread VAT adoption worldwide, but there is surprisingly little evidence. This paper analyzes the role of third-party information f...

One Swallow Doesn't Make a Summer: New Evidence on Anchoring Effects

By Zacharias Maniadis, Fabio Tufano, and John A. List

American Economic Review, January 2014

Some researchers have argued that anchoring in economic valuations casts doubt on the assumption of consistent and stable preferences. We present new evidence that explores the strength of certain anchoring results. We then present a theoretical framew...

International Robust Disagreement

By Riccardo Colacito and Mariano M. Croce

American Economic Review, May 2012

We characterize the equilibrium of a two-country, two-good economy in which agents have opposite preference bias toward one of the two consumption goods and fear model misspecification. We document that disagreement about endowments' growth prospects is a...

Stock Prices, News, and Economic Fluctuations: Comment

By André Kurmann and Elmar Mertens

American Economic Review, April 2014

Beaudry and Portier (2006) propose an identification scheme to study the effects of news shocks about future productivity in vector error correction models (VECMs). This comment shows that, when applied to their VECMs with more than two variables, the ...

State versus Private Ownership

[Symposium: The Firm and its Boundaries]

By Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the 'dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The ...

Human Capital Persistence and Development

By Rudi Rocha, Claudio Ferraz, and Rodrigo R. Soares

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

This paper documents the persistence of human capital over time and its association with long-term development. We exploit variation induced by a state-sponsored settlement policy that attracted immigrants with higher levels of schooling to particular reg...

Review of The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

By Stanley L. Engerman

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

The two books being reviewed are concerned with the importance of slavery in the antebellum US South for the economic development of the Northern states. One (Schermerhorn) deals primarily with Southern financial arrangements facilitating the sales of sla...

Career and Marriage in the Age of the Pill

By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, May 2000

Comments on Economic Models, Economics, and Economists: Remarks on Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik

By Ariel Rubinstein

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

This essay reviews Dani Rodrik's superb book Economics Rules and argues that it can serve as an ideal platform for discussing what economists can and should accomplish. The essay comments on some of the major issues in contemporary economics examin...

HIV Risk and Adolescent Behaviors in Africa

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2013

We investigate the relationship between HIV, marriage and nonmarital sexual activity, with a focus on adolescent behaviors. We use data from 45 Demographic and Health Surveys to examine how adolescent behavior among women born from 1958 to 1965 are relate...

Political Influence and the Dynamic Consistency of Policy

By Michelle R. Garfinkel and Jaewoo Lee

American Economic Review, June 2000

Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India

By Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, and Sandip Sukhtankar

American Economic Review, October 2016

Antipoverty programs in developing countries are often difficult to implement; in particular, many governments lack the capacity to deliver payments securely to targeted beneficiaries. We evaluate the impact of biometrically authenticated payments infrast...

A Century of Growth and Improvement

By Benjamin M. Friedman

American Economic Review, May 2016

The fact that actual economic advance over time normally means producing and consuming different things is usually left implicit in modern models of economic growth. By contrast, qualitative change--new goods and services, and better versions of what alre...

School Choice, School Quality, and Postsecondary Attainment

By David J. Deming, Justine S. Hastings, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger

American Economic Review, March 2014

We study the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion. We find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school. ...

The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Reply

By Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway

American Economic Review, March 2000

The Psychological Lives of the Poor

By Frank Schilbach, Heather Schofield, and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2016

All individuals rely on a fundamental set of mental capacities and functions, or bandwidth, in their economic and non-economic lives. Yet, many factors associated with poverty, such as malnutrition, alcohol consumption, or sleep deprivation, may tax this ...

The Effect of Globalization on the Performance of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the United States: Does Owners' Race/Ethnicity Matter?

By Elizabeth Asiedu and James A. Freeman

American Economic Review, May 2007

Monetary Aggregates and Output

By Scott Freeman and Finn E. Kydland

American Economic Review, December 2000

We ask whether the following observations may result from endogenously determined fluctuations in the money multiplier rather than a causal influence of money on output: (i) M1 is positively correlated with real output; (ii) the money multiplier and depos...