New Evidence on Taxes and the Timing of Birth

By Sara LaLumia, James M. Sallee, and Nicholas Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

This paper uses data from the universe of tax returns filed between 2001 and 2010 to test whether parents shift the timing of childbirth around the New Year to gain tax benefits. Filers have an incentive to shift births from early January into late Decemb...

Credit Markets, Credibility, and Economic Transformation

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By Guillermo A. Calvo and Jacob A. Frenkel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

This paper focuses on the special role that capital markets play in the transformation of centrally planned economies into well-functioning market economies. We demonstrate that underdeveloped credit markets inhibit the effectiveness of price reform, mone...

Retrospectives: Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

In this article, I discuss some earlier debates about the foundations of utility and its measurement, focusing on the contributions of Francis Y. Edgeworth (1845-1926), a famous British economist who was a leader in the development of a more mathematicall...

Decentralized Deterrence, with an Application to Labor Tax Auditing

By Edoardo Di Porto, Nicola Persico, and Nicolas Sahuguet

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

This paper studies a new strategic auditing game in which atomistic auditors maximize the success rate of audits, and provides a method to calibrate its parameters based on audit data. Calibrating the model to Italian auditing data, we provide an estim...

Initial Labor Market Conditions and Long-Term Outcomes for Economists

[Symposium: The Market for Economists]

By Paul Oyer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

Each year, graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk. Given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia, one mig...

Misallocation, Establishment Size, and Productivity

By Pedro Bento and Diego Restuccia

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

We consider a model of heterogeneous production units with endogenous entry and productivity investment to assess the quantitative impact of policy distortions: when the productivity elasticity of distortions increases from 0.09 in the United States to 0....

Frequency-Specific Effects of Stabilization Policies

By William A. Brock, Steven N. Durlauf, and Giacomo Rondina

American Economic Review, May 2008

Superfund Cleanups and Infant Health

By Janet Currie, Michael Greenstone, and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2011

We are the first to examine the effect of Superfund cleanups on infant health rather than focusing on proximity to a site. We study singleton births to mothers residing within 5km of a Superfund site between 1989-2003 in five large states. Our "difference...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

Importing Skill-Biased Technology

By Ariel Burstein, Javier Cravino, and Jonathan Vogel

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2013

The production of capital equipment is concentrated among a small group of countries, and many countries import a large share of their equipment. If capital-skill complementarity is an important feature of technology, international trade may have impor...

The Effects of the Massachusetts Health Reform on Household Financial Distress

By Bhashkar Mazumder and Sarah Miller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

In this paper, we examine the effect of a major health care reform in Massachusetts on a broad set of financial outcomes using credit report data. We exploit variation in the impact of the reform across counties and age groups using pre-reform insurance c...

Market Culture: How Rules Governing Exploding Offers Affect Market Performance

By Muriel Niederle and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

Many markets encounter difficulty maintaining a thick marketplace because they experience transactions made at dispersed times. To address such problems, many markets try to establish norms concerning when offers can be made, accepted, and rejected. Ex...

Economists and the Media

[Symposium: Economists as Policy Advocates]

By Michael Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

When my colleagues at The New York Times use the word "academic," they intend no compliment; they mean irrelevant. And when my former colleagues in the academy describe someone's work as "journalistic," they invariably mean shallow. One way to frame discu...

Declining Volatility in the U.S. Automobile Industry

By Valerie A. Ramey and Daniel J. Vine

American Economic Review, December 2006

Dramatic changes in the volatility of output occurred in the U.S. auto industry in the early 1980s. Namely, output volatility declined, the covariance of inventory investment and sales grew more negative, and adjustments to production schedules, which in ...

Spatial Development

By Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, April 2014

We present a theory of spatial development. Manufacturing and services firms located in a continuous geographic area choose each period how much to innovate. Firms trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially. We apply the model t...

Puzzles: Professional Advice and Other Hazards

By Suzanne Scotchmer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1990

This edition includes four puzzles, all with answers given at the end.

Identification of the Effect of Depression on Risky Sexual Behavior: Exploiting a Natural Experiment

By Susan L. Averett and Yang Wang

American Economic Review, May 2012

Depression is pervasive in the US particularly among women. The costs in terms of direct medical costs and forgone earnings are substantial. This paper investigates an additional cost of depression. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adol...

Regulatory Races: The Effects of Jurisdictional Competition on Regulatory Standards

By Bruce G. Carruthers and Naomi R. Lamoreaux

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

This article surveys the literature on regulatory arbitrage in four settings: labor regulation, environmental protection, corporate governance, and banking and finance. For a regulatory race to occur, firms must migrate across state or country borders in ...

Convergence in Macroeconomics: Elements of the New Synthesis

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

While macroeconomics is often thought of as a deeply divided field, with less of a shared core and correspondingly less cumulative progress than other areas of economics, in fact, there are fewer fundamental disagreements among macroeconomists now than...

Macroeconomic Performance and Collective Bargaining: An International Perspective

By Robert J. Flanagan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 1999

This paper critically reviews the research on how collective bargaining systems influence macroeconomic performance in industrialized countries. The review considers effects of bargaining level, coordination, and corporatist institutional arrangements. Ke...