Lemons Markets and the Transmission of Aggregate Shocks

By Pablo Kurlat

American Economic Review, June 2013

I study a dynamic economy featuring adverse selection in asset markets. Borrowing-constrained entrepreneurs sell past projects to finance new investment, but asymmetric information creates a lemons problem. I show that this friction is equivalent to a tax...

Short-Run Impacts of Accountability on School Quality

By Jonah Rockoff and Lesley J. Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2010

In the fall of 2007, New York City began using student tests and other measures to assign each school a grade (A to F), and linked grades to rewards and consequences, including possible school closure. These grades were released in late September, arguabl...

Widening and Deepening: Reforming the European Union

By Erik Berglof, Mike Burkart, Guido Friebel, and Elena Paltseva

American Economic Review, May 2008

Retrospectives: Challenges to Free Trade

By Douglas A. Irwin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

The recent theoretical literature on strategic trade policy suggests that government intervention in international trade has the potential to be welfare improving. Government promotion of exports from imperfectly competitive industries, for example, may e...

Limited Life Expectancy, Human Capital and Health Investments

By Emily Oster, Ira Shoulson, and E. Ray Dorsey

American Economic Review, August 2013

Human capital theory predicts that life expectancy will impact human capital attainment. We estimate this relationship using variation in life expectancy driven by Huntington disease, an inherited neurological disorder. We compare investments for individu...

Two Generalizations of a Deposit-Refund Systems

By Don Fullerton and Ann Wolverton

American Economic Review, May 2000

Activist Fiscal Policy

By Alan J. Auerbach, William G. Gale, and Benjamin H. Harris

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

During and after the "Great Recession" that began in December 2007, the U.S. federal government enacted several rounds of activist fiscal policy. In this paper, we review the recent evolution of thinking and evidence regarding the effectiveness of activis...

Entrepreneurial Innovation: Killer Apps in the iPhone Ecosystem

By Pai-Ling Yin, Jason P. Davis, and Yulia Muzyrya

American Economic Review, May 2014

The mobile applications (apps) industry has exhibited rapid entry and growth in the midst of a recession. Using unique data from the iPhone application ecosystem, we examine how the development of "killer apps" (apps appearing in the top grossing rank) va...

Social Comparisons and Contributions to Online Communities: A Field Experiment on MovieLens

By Yan Chen, F. Maxwell Harper, Joseph Konstan, and Sherry Xin Li

American Economic Review, September 2010

We design a field experiment to explore the use of social comparison to increase contributions to an online community. We find that, after receiving behavioral information about the median user's total number of movie ratings, users below the median demon...

Retrospectives: Classical Family Values: Ending the Poor Laws as They Knew Them

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Poor law reform in the early 1830s provides a key example of the deep conflicts between classical liberal principles of self-reliance and the realities of dependency. Eminent economists, such as Nassau Senior and Thomas Malthus, argued that the dependency...

Markets: Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?

By Benjamin Edelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

This paper studies the adult online entertainment industry, particularly the consumption side of the market. In particular, it focuses on the demographics and consumption patterns of those who subscribe to adult entertainment websites. On the surface, thi...

Subways, Strikes, and Slowdowns: The Impacts of Public Transit on Traffic Congestion

By Michael L. Anderson

American Economic Review, September 2014

Public transit accounts for 1 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled but attracts strong public support. Using a simple choice model, we predict that transit riders are likely to be individuals who commute along routes with severe roadway delays. These ...

Does Welfare Inhibit Success? The Long-Term Effects of Removing Low-Income Youth from the Disability Rolls

By Manasi Deshpande

American Economic Review, November 2016

I estimate the effects of removing low-income youth with disabilities from Supplemental Security Income (SSI) on their earnings and income in adulthood. Using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews, I fin...

In with the Big, Out with the Small: Removing Small-Scale Reservations in India

By Leslie A. Martin, Shanthi Nataraj, and Ann E. Harrison

American Economic Review, February 2017

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates jobs. We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60 years, SSI promotion in India focused on rese...

Black-White Earnings Differentials: Privatization versus Deregulation

By James Peoples and Wayne K. Talley

American Economic Review, May 2001

Climate Treaties and "Breakthrough" Technologies

By Scott Barrett

American Economic Review, May 2006

Excess Male Infant Mortality: The Gene-Institution Interactions

By Roland Pongou, Barthelemy Kuate Defo, and Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

American Economic Review, May 2017

Excess male mortality at early ages is an important source of child inequality in most societies. We examine how improvement in the quality of political institutions affects the male survival disadvantage. Using data on twins in combination with a natural...

Prospect Theory as Efficient Perceptual Distortion

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, May 2012

The paper proposes a theory of efficient perceptual distortions, in which the statistical relation between subjective perceptions and the objective state minimizes the error of the state estimate, subject to a constraint on information processing capacity...

Zipf's Law, Pareto's Law, and the Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States

By Shuhei Aoki and Makoto Nirei

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

We construct a tractable neoclassical growth model that generates Pareto's law of income distribution and Zipf's law of the firm size distribution from idiosyncratic, firm-level productivity shocks. Executives and entrepreneurs invest in risk-free assets,...

A Preanalysis Plan to Replicate Sixty Economics Research Papers That Worked Half of the Time

By Andrew C. Chang and Phillip Li

American Economic Review, May 2017

We attempted to replicate 67 macroeconomic papers using author-provided data and code files by following a preanalysis plan. Excluding 6 papers that used confidential data, we obtained data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83 percent) that ...