Annuities and Individual Welfare

By Thomas Davidoff, Jeffrey R. Brown, and Peter A. Diamond

American Economic Review, December 2005

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness which are substantially less restrictive than those used by Menahem E. Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompl...

Quantitative Effects of Fiscal Foresight

By Eric M. Leeper, Alexander W. Richter, and Todd B. Walker

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

Legislative and implementation lags imply that substantial time evolves between when news arrives about fiscal changes and when the changes actually take place—time when households and firms can adjust their behavior. We identify two types of fiscal...

Gary Becker as Teacher

By Kevin M. Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper looks at the work of Gary S. Becker, American economist, professor of sociology, friend, and colleague of Kevin M. Murphy. Murphy discusses the traditional approach of Becker's teaching and ideas as they were expressed through his wealth of con...

Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan's Laws

By Leigh Linden and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, June 2008

We estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move-in dates of sex offenders. We find significant effects of sex offenders' locations that are geographically localized. House prices within 0.1 miles of a sex offend...

Debt Maturity and the International Financial Architecture

By Olivier Jeanne

American Economic Review, December 2009

This paper presents a theory of the maturity of international sovereign debt, and derives its implications for the reform of the international financial architecture. The analysis is based on a model in which the need to roll over external debt discipline...

Optimal Design of Trade Agreements in the Presence of Renegotiation

By Giovanni Maggi and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We study the optimal design of trade agreements when governments can renegotiate after the resolution of uncertainty but compensation between them is inefficient. In equilibrium, renegotiation always results in trade liberalization, not protection. The op...

The Social Experiment Market

By David Greenberg, Mark Shroder, and Matthew Onstott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

In social experiments, individuals, households, or organizations are randomly assigned to two or more policy interventions. Elsewhere, we have summarized 143 experiments completed by autumn 1996. Here, we use the information we have gathered on these expe...

Are State Governments Roadblocks to Federal Stimulus? Evidence on the Flypaper Effect of Highway Grants in the 2009 Recovery Act

By Sylvain Leduc and Daniel Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This paper examines how state governments adjusted spending in response to the large temporary increase in federal highway grants under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The mechanism used to apportion ARRA highway grants to states a...

The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Ethiopia

By Alessandro Tarozzi, Jaikishan Desai, and Kristin Johnson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We use data from a randomized controlled trial conducted in 2003-2006 in rural Amhara and Oromiya (Ethiopia) to study the impacts of increasing access to microfinance on a number of socioeconomic outcomes, including income from agriculture, animal husband...

An Analysis of Economic Warfare

By Jeffrey Clemens

American Economic Review, May 2013

I develop a framework for assessing economic warfare, which describes efforts to undermine adversaries' sources of income. The ability to target adversarial market participants is a primary determinant of the success of such efforts, as is the elasticity ...

Minority Groups in the Economics Profession

By Susan M. Collins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The primary objective of this paper is to provide information about minorities (blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans)in economics, at various stages in the education pipeline, and in the labor market. Despite sustained increases in the numbers and perce...

Macroeconomic Consequences of Population Aging in the United States: Overview of a National Academy Report

By Ronald D. Lee

American Economic Review, May 2014

The US population will age rapidly for several decades and then more slowly, with less aging than most rich nations. Health of the elderly has greatly improved, but disability stagnated after 2000. Retirement age reversed its decline in the mid-1990s and ...

Bank Integration and Transmission of Financial Shocks: Evidence from Japan

By Masami Imai and Seitaro Takarabe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

This paper investigates whether banking integration plays an important role in transmitting financial shocks across geographical boundaries by using a dataset on the branch network of nationwide city banks and prefecture-level dataset on the formation and...

Understanding Real Business Cycles

[Symposium: Real Business Cycles]

By Charles I. Plosser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

This brief essay is intended to provide readers with an introduction to the real business cycle approach to business fluctuations. It discusses the basic real business cycle framework; economic growth and business cycles; real business cycles and the 1954...

Venture Capitals As Principals: Contracting, Screening, and Monitoring

By Steven N. Kaplan and Per Stromberg

American Economic Review, May 2001

Purchasing Power Parity Exchange Rates for the Global Poor

By Angus Deaton and Olivier Dupriez

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

The global poverty count uses a common global poverty line, often referred to as the dollar-a-day line, currently $1.25 at 2005 international prices, whose construction and application depends on purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates for consumptio...

Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World

By Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Stanley L. Engerman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

The explanations offered for the contrasting records of long-run growth and development among the societies of North and South America most often focus on institutions. The traditional explanations for the sources of these differences in institutions, typ...

Choice under Uncertainty: Problems Solved and Unsolved

By Mark J. Machina

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

Fifteen years ago, the theory of choice under uncertainty could be considered one of the "success stories" of economic analysis: it rested on solid axiomatic foundations, it had seen important breakthroughs in the analytics of risk, risk aversion, and the...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Janet Currie

American Economic Review, May 2011

Taxes, High-Income Executives, and the Perils of Revenue Estimation in the New Economy

By Austan Goolsbee

American Economic Review, May 2000