Birth Timing and Neonatal Health

By Cristina Borra, Libertad González, and Almudena Sevilla

American Economic Review, May 2016

We take advantage of a new natural experiment to evaluate the health effects of scheduling birth early for non-medical reasons on infant health. In 2010, the cancellation of a generous child benefit in Spain led may families to schedule birth early in ord...

Redesigning the Israeli Psychology Master's Match

By Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm, and Ran I. Shorrer

American Economic Review, May 2017

We report on the centralization of a two-sided matching-with-contracts market, in which pre-existing choice functions violate the substitutes condition. The ability to accommodate these choice functions was critical for the success of our design. The new ...

Dynamic Procurement under Uncertainty: Optimal Design and Implications for Incomplete Contracts

By Malin Arve and David Martimort

American Economic Review, November 2016

We characterize the optimal dynamic contract for a long-term basic service when an uncertain add-on is required later on. Introducing firm risk aversion has two impacts. Profits for the basic service can be backloaded to induce cheaper information revelat...

The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) microdata over the 1980-2010 period, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably during this time. By 2010, conventional human capital vari...

This Job Is "Getting Old": Measuring Changes in Job Opportunities Using Occupational Age Structure

By David Autor and David Dorn

American Economic Review, May 2009

A Simple Model of Subprime Borrowers and Credit Growth

By Alejandro Justiniano, Giorgio E. Primiceri, and Andrea Tambalotti

American Economic Review, May 2016

The surge in credit and house prices that preceded the Great Recession was particularly pronounced in ZIP codes with a higher fraction of subprime borrowers (Mian and Sufi, 2009). We present a simple model with prime and subprime borrowers distributed acr...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

Health and Schooling Investments in Africa

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By T. Paul Schultz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Intercountry comparisons show Africa's health and education falls short of other regions, controlling for income, women's educations, and urbanization, but growth regressions do not clarify whether this low human capital caused slow growth. Microeconometr...

Long-Term Impacts of Individual Development Accounts on Homeownership among Baseline Renters: Follow-Up Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Michael Sherraden, William G. Gale, William M. Rohe, Mark Schreiner, and Clinton Key

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

We examine the long-term effects of a 1998-2003 randomized experiment in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Individual Development Accounts that offered low-income households 2:1 matching funds for housing down payments. Prior work shows that, among households who r...

Retrospectives: Engel Curves

By Andreas Chai and Alessio Moneta

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Engel curves describe how household expenditure on particular goods or services depends on household income. German statistician Ernst Engel (1821-1896) was the first to investigate this relationship systematically in an article published about 150 years ...

Why Are Recessions Good for Your Health?

By Douglas L. Miller, Marianne E. Page, Ann Huff Stevens, and Mateusz Filipski

American Economic Review, May 2009

From Mill Town to Board Room: The Rise of Women's Paid Labor

[Symposium: Women and the Labor Market]

By Dora L. Costa

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

The widespread participation of women in paid labor outside of the home and in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of a century ago. This paper documents this dramatic change in women's social and economic status and argues that it was...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

By Andrew Postlewaite

American Economic Review, May 2016

Retrospectives: Price Indexes and General Exchange Values

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

The spreading use of indexes in the nineteenth century raised basic questions concerning the nature of absolute value in a neoclassical world of relative exchange values. Where Walsh held that the 'right' index for the general exchange value of money woul...

Incarceration Length, Employment, and Earnings

By Jeffrey R. Kling

American Economic Review, June 2006

This paper estimates effects of increases in incarceration length on employment and earnings prospects of individuals after their release from prison. I utilize a variety of research designs including controlling for observable factors and using instrumen...

Report of the Secretary for 2010

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2011

Asymmetric Contests with Conditional Investments

By Ron Siegel

American Economic Review, December 2010

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and R& races, among others. I provide an...

Correspondence

By Frederick Guy, Andrei Shleifer, Neil Perry, Andrew Metrick, Martin L. Weitzman, Barbara R. Bergmann, David Laidler, and George S. Tavlas

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Security Price Informativeness with Delegated Traders

By Gary Gorton, Ping He, and Lixin Huang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2010

Trade in securities markets is conducted by agents acting for principals, using "mark-to-market" contracts whereby performance is assessed using security market prices. We endogenize contract choices, information production, informed trading, and security...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015