Retrospectives: Between God and the Market: The Religious Roots of the American Economic Association

By Bradley W. Bateman and Ethan B. Kapstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

This essay examines the strong influence of the Social Gospel movement on the founding of the American Economic Association. Richard T. Ely, the driving force behind the Association's founding, was also the most popular figure in the Social Gospel movemen...

The Spending and Debt Response to Minimum Wage Hikes

By Daniel Aaronson, Sumit Agarwal, and Eric French

American Economic Review, December 2012

Immediately following a minimum wage hike, household income rises on average by about $250 per quarter and spending by roughly $700 per quarter for households with minimum wage workers. Most of the spending response is caused by a small number of house...

The Long-Run Economic Consequences of High-Stakes Examinations: Evidence from Transitory Variation in Pollution

By Avraham Ebenstein, Victor Lavy, and Sefi Roth

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

Cognitive performance during high-stakes exams can be affected by random disturbances that, even if transitory, may have permanent consequences. We evaluate this hypothesis among Israeli students who took a series of matriculation exams between 2000 and 2...

Workers Are More Productive in Large Firms

By Todd L. Idson and Walter Y. Oi

American Economic Review, May 1999

Job Destruction and Propagation of Shocks

By Wouter J. den Haan, Garey Ramey, and Joel Watson

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper considers propagation of aggregate shocks in a dynamic general-equilibrium model with labor-market matching and endogenous job destruction. Cyclical fluctuations in the job-destruction rate magnify the output effects of shocks, as well as makin...

Trade Liberalization and Regional Dynamics

By Rafael Dix-Carneiro and Brian K. Kovak

American Economic Review, October 2017

We study the evolution of trade liberalization's effects on Brazilian local labor markets. Regions facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines in formal sector employment and earnings relative to other regions. The impact of tariff changes on...

Estimating the Market-Perceived Monetary Policy Rule

By James D. Hamilton, Seth Pruitt, and Scott Borger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2011

We introduce a novel method for estimating a monetary policy rule using macroeconomic news. We estimate directly the policy rule agents use to form their expectations by linking news' effects on forecasts of both economic conditions and monetary policy. E...

The Motivation and Bias of Bureaucrats

By Canice Prendergast

American Economic Review, March 2007

Many individuals are motivated to exert effort because they care about their jobs, rather than because there are monetary consequences to their actions. The intrinsic motivation of bureaucrats is the focus of this paper, and three primary results are s...

Do Value-Added Estimates Add Value? Accounting for Learning Dynamics

By Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Tristan Zajonc

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

This paper illustrates the central role of persistence in estimating and interpreting value-added models of learning. Using data from Pakistani public and private schools, we apply dynamic panel methods that address three key empirical challenges: imperfe...

Financial Decision-Making: Are Women Really More Risk-Averse?

By Renate Schubert, Martin Brown, Matthias Gysler, and Hans Wolfgang Brachinger

American Economic Review, May 1999

De Facto Political Power and Institutional Persistence

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Impact of Global Warming on Agriculture: A Ricardian Analysis: Reply

By Robert Mendelsohn and William D. Nordhaus

American Economic Review, September 1999

Women and Affirmative Action

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Jonathan S. Leonard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

This paper reviews evidence indicating that, as it has been enforced so far, affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women's progress in the workplace. Affirmative action can be modeled as a tax on employers whose female employment growth falls b...

Credit Relationships and Business Bankruptcy during the Great Depression

By Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Nicolas L. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2017

Credit relationships are sticky. Stickiness makes relationships beneficial to borrowers in times of their own distress but makes them potentially problematic when lenders themselves face hardship. To examine the role of credit relationships during a finan...

Exclusive Dealing and Entry, when Buyers Compete

By Chiara Fumagalli and Massimo Motta

American Economic Review, June 2006

Rasmusen et al. (1991) and Segal and Whinston (2000) show that an incumbent monopolist might prevent entry of a more efficient competitor by exploiting externalities among buyers. We show that their results hold only when downstream competition among buye...

Intertemporal Consumption and Credit Constraints: Does Total Expenditure Respond to an Exogenous Shock to Credit?

By Søren Leth-Petersen

American Economic Review, June 2010

There is continuing controversy over the importance of credit constraints. This paper investigates whether total household expenditure and debt is affected by an exogenous increase in access to credit provided by a credit market reform that enabled Danish...

Conclusions Regarding Cross-Group Differences in Happiness Depend on Difficulty of Reaching Respondents

By Ori Heffetz and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, December 2013

A growing literature explores differences in subjective well-being across demographic groups, often relying on surveys with high nonresponse rates. By using the reported number of call attempts made to participants in the University of Michigan's Surve...

Output and Welfare Effects of Inflation with Costly Price and Quantity Adjustments

By Leif Danziger

American Economic Review, December 2001

The Welfare Effects of Use-or-Lose Provisions in Markets with Dominant Firms

By Ian Gale and Daniel P. O'Brien

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

A use-or-lose provision requires that firms employ a certain minimum fraction of their productive capacity. Variants have been used by regulators in the airline and wireless communications industries, among others. A typical stated objective is to limi...

An Empirical Model of the Medical Match

By Nikhil Agarwal

American Economic Review, July 2015

This paper develops a framework for estimating preferences in a many-to-one matching market using only observed matches. I use pairwise stability and a vertical preference restriction on one side to identify preferences on both sides of the market. Counte...