The Transparency of Politics and the Quality of Politicians

By Andrea Mattozzi and Antonio Merlo

American Economic Review, May 2007

Asylum Applications and Migration Flows

By Anouch Missirian and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, May 2017

We discuss an underutilized dataset to examine the causes of migration. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees publishes annual binational asylum applications and the resulting decisions. Asylum is granted to protect individuals from persecutio...

Competing in Advanced Manufacturing: The Need for Improved Growth Models and Policies

[Symposium: Manufacturing]

By Gregory Tassey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

The United States has underinvested for several decades in a set of productivity-enhancing assets necessary for the long-term health of its manufacturing sector. Conventional characterizations of the process of bringing new advanced manufacturing produc...

Signing Up New Fathers: Do Paternity Establishment Initiatives Increase Marriage, Parental Investment, and Child Well-Being?

By Maya Rossin-Slater

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

With nearly half of US births occurring out of wedlock, understanding how parents navigate their relationship options is important. This paper examines the consequences of a large exogenous change to parental relationship contract options on parental beha...

Monopoly Rights: A Barrier to Riches

By Stephen L. Parente and Edward C. Prescott

American Economic Review, December 1999

Our thesis is that poor countries are poor because they employ arrangements for which the equilibrium outcomes are characterized by inferior technologies being used, and being used inefficiently. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of one such arra...

Machine Learning: An Applied Econometric Approach

[Symposium: Recent Ideas in Econometrics]

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Jann Spiess

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

Machines are increasingly doing "intelligent" things. Face recognition algorithms use a large dataset of photos labeled as having a face or not to estimate a function that predicts the presence y of a face from pixels x. This similarity ...

The Role of Local Officials in New Democracies: Evidence from Indonesia

By Monica Martinez-Bravo

American Economic Review, April 2014

This paper shows that the body of appointed officials that a new democracy inherits from the previous regime is a key determinant of the extent of electoral fraud and clientelistic spending in new democracies. I develop a model that predicts that appoi...

Job-to-Job Flows in the Great Recession

By Henry Hyatt and Erika McEntarfer

American Economic Review, May 2012

We develop prototype job-to-job flow measures to provide new evidence on labor turnover and earnings dynamics in the Great Recession. We find a sharp drop in job mobility in the Great Recession, much sharper than the previous recession, and higher earning...

Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter?

By Manuel Bagues, Mauro Sylos-Labini, and Natalia Zinovyeva

American Economic Review, April 2017

We analyze how a larger presence of female evaluators affects committee decision-making using information on 100,000 applications to associate and full professorships in Italy and Spain. These applications were assessed by 8,000 randomly selected evaluato...

Child Gender and Parental Inputs: No More Son Preference in Korea?

By Eleanor Jawon Choi and Jisoo Hwang

American Economic Review, May 2015

Sex ratio at birth remains highly skewed in Asian countries due to son preference. In South Korea, however, it has declined to the natural ratio. In this paper, we investigate whether son preference has disappeared in Korea by analyzing parents' time and ...

EU Institutional Reform: Evidence on Globalization and International Cooperation

By Richard Baldwin

American Economic Review, May 2008

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2010

Conditional Cash Transfers: The Case of Progresa/Oportunidades

By Susan W. Parker and Petra E. Todd

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs innovate by conditioning transfers to poor families on investments in the human capital of children and other family members. The Mexican CCT program Progresa/Oportunidades began in 1997 and has served as a ...

On the Driving Forces behind Cyclical Movements in Employment and Job Reallocation

By Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger

American Economic Review, December 1999

Theory restricts short-run job creation and destruction responses and cumulative employment and job reallocation responses to allocative and aggregate shocks. We formulate these restrictions and implement them for postwar data on U.S. manufacturing. Alloc...

Consumer Financial Protection

[Symposium: Financial Regulation after the Crisis]

By John Y. Campbell, Howell E. Jackson, Brigitte C. Madrian, and Peter Tufano

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

The recent financial crisis has led many to question how well businesses deliver services and how well regulatory institutions address problems in consumer financial markets. This paper discusses consumer financial regulation, emphasizing the full range o...

Not Only What but Also When: A Theory of Dynamic Voluntary Disclosure

By Ilan Guttman, Ilan Kremer, and Andrzej Skrzypacz

American Economic Review, August 2014

We examine a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of private information. In our model, a manager of a firm who may learn multiple signals over time interacts with a competitive capital market and maximizes payoffs that increase in bot...

The Possible Unemployment Cost of Average Inflation below a Credible Target

By Lars E. O. Svensson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2015

If inflation expectations become firmly anchored at the inflation target even when average inflation deviates from the target, the long-run Phillips curve becomes nonvertical. During 1997-2011, average inflation expectations in Sweden have been close to t...

The Willingness to Pay—Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations: Comment

By Andrea Isoni, Graham Loomes, and Robert Sugden

American Economic Review, April 2011

Plott and Zeiler (2005) report that the willingness-to-pay/willingness-to-accept disparity is absent for mugs in a particular experimental setting, designed to neutralize misconceptions about the procedures used to elicit valuations. This result has recei...

The Changing Incidence and Severity of Poverty Spells among Female-Headed Families

By David Card and Rebecca M. Blank

American Economic Review, May 2008

Learning from Failure: A Review of Peter Schuck's Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better

By David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf's theory of nonma...