Inequality, Leverage, and Crises

By Michael Kumhof, Romain Rancière, and Pablo Winant

American Economic Review, March 2015

The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can be caused by changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase ...

Human Capital vs. Signalling Explanations of Wages

By Andrew Weiss

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

The key difference between signalling and human capital models is that signalling models allow firms to draw inferences about unobserved characteristics of workers. Those inferences can be based on the schooling or work experience of workers, or on direct...

Markets: Gift Cards

By Jennifer Pate Offenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

The Mobil Oil Company introduced the first retail gift card that recorded value on a magnetic strip in 1995. In under a decade, such gift cards replaced apparel as the number one item sold during the Christmas season. This study will discuss the reasons f...

Price Flexibility and Output Stability: An Old Keynesian View

[Symposium: Keynesian Economics Today]

By James Tobin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

In this symposium I shall play the role in which I was cast, the unreconstructed old Keynesian. Considering the alternatives, I do not mind being billed as a Keynesian, an old Keynesian at that. But old Keynesians come in several varieties, and I speak fo...

Moral Hazard and Claims Deterrence in Private Disability Insurance

By David Autor, Mark Duggan, and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Exploiting within-firm, over-time variation in plan parameters for nearly 10,000 Long Term Disability (LTD) policies held by US employers, we present the first empirical analysis of the determinants of private LTD spells. We find that a shorter waiting pe...

Macroeconomics and Methodology

[Symposium: Computational Experiments in Macroeconomics]

By Christopher A. Sims

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

Probabilistic reasoning is essential to discourse in economics. This is true in any discipline in which, as in economics, data collection is constrained and beliefs about the phenomena being studied are crucial to decisions that cannot be delayed. Some ec...

What the Seller Won't Tell You: Persuasion and Disclosure in Markets

[Symposium: Economics of Persuasion]

By Paul Milgrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

Imagine that you are considering an investment in a new public offering of a firm's shares. The firm's officers make a presentation that includes an audited financial statement, an earnings forecast reviewed by its prestigious investment bankers, and an i...

Health and Democracy

By Timothy Besley and Masayuki Kudamatsu

American Economic Review, May 2006

Electoral Rules and Politicians' Behavior: A Micro Test

By Stefano Gagliarducci, Tommaso Nannicini, and Paolo Naticchioni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Theory predicts that the majoritarian electoral system should produce more targeted redistribution and lower rents than proportional representation. We test these predictions using data on the Italian House of Representatives, and address the nonrandom se...

Time as a Trade Barrier

By David L. Hummels and Georg Schaur

American Economic Review, December 2013

A large and growing share of world trade travels by air. We model exporters' choice between fast, expensive air cargo and slow, cheap ocean cargo, which depends on the price elasticity of demand and the value that consumers attach to fast delivery. We ...

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2014

Environmental Regulations, Air and Water Pollution, and Infant Mortality in India

By Michael Greenstone and Rema Hanna

American Economic Review, October 2014

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India's environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations ...

The Triumph of Monetarism?

[Symposium: Looking Backward at Economics and the Economy]

By J. Bradford De Long

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

The story of 20th century macroeconomics begins with Irving Fisher. In his books Appreciation and Interest (1896), The Rate of Interest (1907), and The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher fueled the intellectual fire that became known as monetarism. ...

This Mine Is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa

By Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Dominic Rohner, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, June 2017

We combine georeferenced data on mining extraction of 14 minerals with information on conflict events at spatial resolution of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree for all of Africa between 1997 and 2010. Exploiting exogenous variations in world prices, we find a posi...

Quality Disclosure Programs and Internal Organizational Practices: Evidence from Airline Flight Delays

By Silke J. Forbes, Mara Lederman, and Trevor Tombe

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

Disclosure programs exist in many industries in which consumers are poorly informed about product quality. We study a disclosure program for airline on-time performance, which ranks airlines based on the fraction of their flights that arrive less than 15 ...

Benefit-Cost Analysis for Financial Regulation

By Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl

American Economic Review, May 2013

Calls for benefit-cost analysis in rule-making, based on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, have revealed a paucity of work on allocative efficiency in financial markets. We propose three principles to help fill this gap. First, we highlight the need ...

Homeownership, Community Interactions, and Segregation

By Karla Hoff and Arijit Sen

American Economic Review, September 2005

We show that individuals with identical preferences and abilities can self-organize into communities with starkly different civic environments. Specifically, we consider a multi-community city where community quality depends upon residents' efforts to pre...

When Does Communication Improve Coordination?

By Tore Ellingsen and Robert Östling

American Economic Review, September 2010

We study costless pre-play communication of intentions among inexperienced players. Using the level-k model of strategic thinking to describe players' beliefs, we fully characterize the effects of preplay communication in symmetric 2x2 games. One-way comm...

Gamma Discounting

By Martin L. Weitzman

American Economic Review, March 2001

By incorporating the probability distribution directly into the analysis, this paper proposes a new theoretical approach to resolving the perennial dilemma of being uncertain about what discount rate to use in cost-benefit analysis. A numerical example is...

The Economics of Child Labor: Reply

By Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van

American Economic Review, December 1999