Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, and Julia Tobias

American Economic Review, June 2012

This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hy...

Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia

By Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang and Feng Zhu

American Economic Review, June 2011

The literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size. We find, however, that after an exogenous reduction of group size at Chinese Wikipedia, the nonblocked contributors d...

Markets: The Fulton Fish Market

By Kathryn Graddy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

The Fulton Fish Market was a colorful part of the New York City landscape that operated on Fulton Street in Manhattan for over 150 years. In 2005 the market moved from the South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan to Hunts Point in the South Bronx. The Fult...

Bank Leverage and Social Welfare

By Lawrence Christiano and Daisuke Ikeda

American Economic Review, May 2016

We describe a general equilibrium model in which an agency problem arises because bankers must exert an unobserved and costly effort to perform their task. Suppose aggregate banker net worth is too low to insulate creditors from bad outcomes on their bala...

Inventories, Lumpy Trade, and Large Devaluations

By George Alessandria, Joseph P. Kaboski, and Virgiliu Midrigan

American Economic Review, December 2010

We document that delivery lags and transaction-level economics of scale matter for international trade, leading importers to import infrequently and hold additional inventory. In a model with these frictions calibrated to empirical measures of inventory a...

The Restoration of Welfare Economics

By Anthony B. Atkinson

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper argues that welfare economics should be restored to a prominent place on the agenda of economists, and should occupy a central role in the teaching of economics. Economists should provide justification for the ethical criteria underlying welfar...

The Probability of Finding a Job

By Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, May 2008

The New Patent Intermediaries: Platforms, Defensive Aggregators, and Super-Aggregators

[Symposium: Patents]

By Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

The patent market consists mainly of privately negotiated, bilateral transactions, either sales or cross-licenses, between large companies. There is no eBay, Amazon, New York Stock Exchange, or Kelley's Blue Book equivalent for patents, and when buyers a...

Five Facts about Value-Added Exports and Implications for Macroeconomics and Trade Research

[Symposium: Global Supply Chains]

By Robert C. Johnson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Due to the rise of global supply chains, gross exports do not accurately measure the amount of value added exchanged between countries. I highlight five facts about differences between gross and value-added exports. These differences are large and growing...

The Missing Food Problem: Trade, Agriculture, and International Productivity Differences

By Trevor Tombe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Agriculture in poor countries has low productivity, high employment, and negligible trade flows relative to other sectors. These facts motivate a multisector, open-economy view of international productivity differences. With a quantitative multicountry mo...

Projecting the Economic Impact of the Internet

By Robert E. Litan and Alice M. Rivlin

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Economic Impacts of Climate Change: Evidence from Agricultural Output and Random Fluctuations in Weather

By Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Review, March 2007

This paper measures the economic impact of climate change on US agricultural land by estimating the effect of random year-to-year variation in temperature and precipitation on agricultural profits. The preferred estimates indicate that climate change w...

A Black Swan in the Money Market

By John B. Taylor and John C. Williams

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

The recent financial crisis saw a dramatic and persistent jump in interest rate spreads between overnight federal funds and longer - term interbank loans. The Fed took several actions to reduce these spreads including the creation of the Term Auction F...

The Ongoing Evolution of US Retail: A Format Tug-of-War

[Symposium: The Future of Retail]

By Ali Hortaçsu and Chad Syverson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

The past 15-20 years have seen substantial and visible changes in the way US retail business is conducted. Explanations about what is happening in the retail sector have been dominated by two powerful and not fully consistent narratives: a predictio...

Insuring Long-Term Care in the United States

[Symposium: After Retirement]

By Jeffrey R. Brown and Amy Finkelstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Long-term care expenditures constitute one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly in the United States and thus play a central role in determining the retirement security of elderly Americans. In this essay, we begin by providing some...

Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya

By Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries? To shed light on this question, we randomized access to noninterest-bearing bank accounts among two types of self-employed individuals in rural Kenya: market vendors...

The Geography of Medicare

By David M. Cutler and Louise Sheiner

American Economic Review, May 1999

Silver Signals: Twenty-Five Years of Screening and Signaling

By John G. Riley

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2001

The theory of market signaling and screening is a cornerstone of the new economics of information. The last two and a half decades have not only witnessed a series of remarkable theoretical developments but also a wide range of applications. This essay ex...

Wall Street and the Housing Bubble

By Ing-Haw Cheng, Sahil Raina, and Wei Xiong

American Economic Review, September 2014

We analyze whether mid-level managers in securitized finance were aware of a large-scale housing bubble and a looming crisis in 2004-2006 using their personal home transaction data. We find that the average person in our sample neither timed the market no...

How Sharing Information Can Garble Experts' Advice

By Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, and Andrei Kirilenko

American Economic Review, May 2014

We model the strategic provision of advice in environments where a principal's optimal action depends on an unobserved, binary state of interest. Experts receive signals about the state and each recommends an action. The principal and all experts dislike ...