Mortgage Modification and Strategic Behavior: Evidence from a Legal Settlement with Countrywide

By Christopher Mayer, Edward Morrison, Tomasz Piskorski, and Arpit Gupta

American Economic Review, September 2014

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by settlement of U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corpor...

Investment Dispersion and the Business Cycle

By Rüdiger Bachmann and Christian Bayer

American Economic Review, April 2014

The cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level investment rates is procyclical. This makes investment rates different from productivity, output, and employment growth, which have countercyclical dispersions. A calibrated heterogeneous-firm business cycle...

Inequality, Income Growth, and Mobility: The Basic Facts

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By Peter Gottschalk

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

This essay brings together the factual material on changes in the distribution of labor market income that any of the theories addressed in the other papers in this symposium must address. The broad stylized facts are that the rapid growth and stable leve...

Income, Health, and Well-Being around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll

[Symposium: Development]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

During 2006, the Gallup Organization conducted a World Poll that used an identical questionnaire for national samples of adults from 132 countries. I analyze the data on life satisfaction and on health satisfaction and look at their relationships with nat...

The Role of the Exchange Rate in Monetary-Policy Rules

By John B. Taylor

American Economic Review, May 2001

Priceless: The Nonpecuniary Benefits of Schooling

By Philip Oreopoulos and Kjell G. Salvanes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Increasing wealth provides key motivation for students to forgo earnings and struggle through exams. But, as we argue in this paper, schooling generates many experiences and affects many dimensions of skill that, in turn, affect central aspects of individ...

Retrospectives: Friedrich Hayek and the Market Algorithm

By Samuel Bowles, Alan Kirman, and Rajiv Sethi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) is known for his vision of the market economy as an information processing system characterized by spontaneous order: the emergence of coherence through the independent actions of large numbers of individuals, each with limi...

Consumption and Income Inequality and the Great Recession

By Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine changes in consumption and income inequality between 2000 and 2011. During the most recent recession, unemployment rose and asset values declined sharply. We investigate how the recession affected inequality while addressing concerns about unde...

The Limited Influence of Unemployment on the Wage Bargain

By Robert E. Hall and Paul R. Milgrom

American Economic Review, September 2008

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective joint surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may have limited influence. The job-seeker's only credible threat during bargai...

Wheat from Chaff: Meta-analysis as Quantitative Literature Review

By T. D. Stanley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

This paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research, meta-regression analysis or MRA. Economics is theory-driven. Yet, we must learn empirically if economics is to advance. MRA offers a more obj...

The Cyclical Behavior of Equilibrium Unemployment and Vacancies Revisited

By Marcus Hagedorn and Iourii Manovskii

American Economic Review, September 2008

Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We propose a new calibration strategy of ...

What's in a Grade? School Report Cards and the Housing Market

By David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas

American Economic Review, June 2004

This paper investigates whether the housing market responds to the information incorporated in state-administered school grades. We study whether school grades affect families' residential locations and house prices. Using detailed data on repeated sales ...

Limited Attention and the Residential Energy Efficiency Gap

By Karen Palmer and Margaret Walls

American Economic Review, May 2015

Inattention may be an important contributor to the energy efficiency gap and may be particularly acute in residential buildings where many different features will determine a home's energy use. Energy audits can provide information on how to reduce energy...

Implementing the New Fiscal Policy Activism

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Review, May 2009

Racial Bias in the 2008 Presidential Election

By Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Consumption Effects of the 2007–2008 Financial Crisis: Evidence from Households in Denmark

By Thais Lærkholm Jensen and Niels Johannesen

American Economic Review, November 2017

Did the financial crisis in 2007–2008 spread from distressed banks to households through a contraction of the credit supply? We study this question with a dataset that contains observations on all accounts in Danish banks as well as comprehensive ...

Testing for Racial Differences in the Mental Ability of Young Children

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Review, April 2013

Using a new nationally representative dataset, we find minor differences in test outcomes between black and white infants that disappear with a limited set of controls. However, relative to whites, all other races lose substantial ground by age two. Combi...

House Allocation with Overlapping Generations

By Morimitsu Kurino

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

Many real-life applications of house allocation problems are dynamic. For example, each year college freshmen move in and seniors move out of on-campus housing. Each student stays on campus for only a few years. A student is a "newcomer" in the beginning...

How University Endowments Respond to Financial Market Shocks: Evidence and Implications

By Jeffrey R. Brown, Stephen G. Dimmock, Jun-Koo Kang, and Scott J. Weisbenner

American Economic Review, March 2014

Endowment payouts have become an increasingly important component of universities' revenues in recent decades. We study how universities respond to financial shocks to endowments and thus shed light on a number of existing models of endowment behavior. ...

Selection on Moral Hazard in Health Insurance

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Stephen P. Ryan, Paul Schrimpf, and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Review, February 2013

We use employee-level panel data from a single firm to explore the possibility that individuals may select insurance coverage in part based on their anticipated behavioral ("moral hazard") response to insurance, a phenomenon we label "selection on mora...