The Welfare Impact of Second-Best Uniform-Pigouvian Taxation: Evidence from Transportation

By Christopher R. Knittel and Ryan Sandler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

When consumers or firms don't face the true social cost of their actions, market outcomes are inefficient. In the case of negative externalities, Pigouvian taxes are one way to correct this market failure, but it may be infeasible to tax the externality d...

Ownership, Concentration, and Investment

By Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The US business sector has underinvested relative to profits, funding costs, and Tobin's Q since the early 2000s. Building on prior work, we argue that decreasing competition, rising intangibles, and tightening governance explain, respectively, about one-...

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Report: Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Professional Conduct

By Marianne Bertrand

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

(Mis)Allocation, Market Power, and Global Oil Extraction

By John Asker, Allan Collard-Wexler, and Jan De Loecker

American Economic Review, April 2019

We propose an approach to measuring the misallocation of production in a market that compares actual industry cost curves to undistorted (counterfactual) supply curves. As compared to traditional, TFPR-based, misallocation measures, this approach leverage...

The Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth

By Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We present new evidence on global inequality and growth since 1980 using the World and Wealth Income Database. We plot the curve of cumulated growth from 1980 to 2016 by percentile of the global distribution of income per adult. This curve has an elephant...

US Water Pollution Regulation over the Past Half Century: Burning Waters to Crystal Springs?

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By David A. Keiser and Joseph S. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In the half century since the founding of the US Environmental Protection Agency, public and private US sources have spent nearly $5 trillion ($2017) to provide clean rivers, lakes, and drinking water (annual spending of 0.8 percent of US GDP in most ye...

Some Evidence on Secular Drivers of US Safe Real Rates

By Kurt G. Lunsford and Kenneth D. West

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

We study long-run correlations between safe real interest rates in the United States and over 30 variables that have been hypothesized to influence real rates. The list of variables is motivated by an intertermporal IS equation, by models of aggregate s...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2020

The Market for Used Capital: Endogenous Irreversibility and Reallocation over the Business Cycle

By Andrea Lanteri

American Economic Review, September 2018

This paper studies the business-cycle dynamics of secondary markets for physical capital and their effects on the macroeconomy. In the data, both capital reallocation and the price of used capital are procyclical. To rationalize these facts, I propose a m...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2015

Global Firms

By Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Research in international trade has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, as attention has shifted from countries and industries towards the firms actually engaged in international trade. The now-standard heterogeneous firm model posits mea...

Variation in Women's Success across PhD Programs in Economics

[Symposium: Women in Economics]

By Leah Boustan and Andrew Langan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

We document wide and persistent variation in women's representation and success across graduate programs in economics. Using new data on early career outcomes for recent graduates, including first job placement, publications, and promotion, we rank (ano...

The Evolution of Cooperation: The Role of Costly Strategy Adjustments

By Julian Romero and Yaroslav Rosokha

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2019

We study the evolution of cooperation in the indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma when it is costly for players to adjust their strategy. Our experimental interface allows subjects to design a comprehensive strategy that then selects actions for the...

Within-Industry Specialization and Global Market Power

By Ahmad Lashkaripour

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

Export price levels exhibit tremendous cross-national and spatial variation, even within narrowly defined industries. Standard theories attribute this variation to within-industry quality specialization. This paper argues that a significant portion of the...

Learning, Career Paths, and the Distribution of Wages

By Santiago Caicedo, Robert E. Lucas Jr., and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2019

We develop a theory of career paths and earnings where agents organize in production hierarchies. Agents climb these hierarchies as they learn stochastically from others. Earnings grow as agents acquire knowledge and occupy positions with more subordinate...

International Transmission with Heterogeneous Sectors

By Keyu Jin and Nan Li

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

This paper documents new facts about the behavior of capital- and labor-intensive goods over the business cycle and also identifies a mechanism that generates international investment comovement through shifting compositional changes of production and tra...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2019

Mental Budgeting versus Relative Thinking

By Samuel Hirshman, Devin Pope, and Jihong Song

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In many situations, mental budgeting and relative thinking predict results that are in opposing directions. We study a situation of this type and provide evidence for when the predictions of one model will dominate the other.

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018