Income-Induced Expenditure Switching

By Rudolfs Bems and Julian di Giovanni

American Economic Review, December 2016

This paper shows that an income effect can drive expenditure switching between domestic and imported goods. We use a unique Latvian scanner-level dataset, covering the 2008-2009 crisis, to document several empirical findings. First, expenditure switching ...

The When, the How and the Why of Mathematical Expression in the History of Economic Analysis

By Philip Mirowski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

In writings about the history of the use of mathematical expression in economics, there seems to be a conviction that the movement towards its current flowering was cumulative, inevitable, and indeed, natural. While, such notions are widely held among pra...

Feedback Effects, Asymmetric Trading, and the Limits to Arbitrage

By Alex Edmans, Itay Goldstein, and Wei Jiang

American Economic Review, December 2015

We analyze strategic speculators' incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading reveals private information to managers and improves their...

Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-channel Retailers

By Alberto Cavallo

American Economic Review, January 2017

Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices collected offline, where most retail transactions take place. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneo...

Peer Effects in the Workplace

By Thomas Cornelissen, Christian Dustmann, and Uta Schönberg

American Economic Review, February 2017

Existing evidence on peer effects in the productivity of coworkers stems from either laboratory experiments or real-world studies referring to a specific firm or occupation. In this paper, we aim at providing more generalizable results by investigating a ...

Roland Fryer: 2015 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Roland Fryer is an extraordinary applied microeconomist whose research output related to racial inequality, the US racial achievement gap, and the design and evaluation of educational policies make him a worthy recipient of the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal...

The Timing of Monetary Policy Shocks

By Giovanni Olivei and Silvana Tenreyro

American Economic Review, June 2007

A vast empirical literature has documented delayed and persistent effects of monetary policy shocks on output. We show that this finding results from the aggregation of output impulse responses that differ sharply depending on the timing of the shock. ...

Do Workplace Smoking Bans Reduce Smoking?

By William N. Evans, Matthew C. Farrelly, and Edward Montgomery

American Economic Review, September 1999

In recent years workplace smoking policies have become increasingly prevalent and restrictive. Using data from two large-scale national surveys, we investigate whether these policies reduce smoking. Our estimates suggest that workplace bans reduce smoking...

Searching for Effective Teachers with Imperfect Information

[Symposium: No Child Left Behind]

By Douglas O. Staiger and Jonah E. Rockoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

Over the past four decades, empirical researchers -- many of them economists -- have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers. In this paper, we ask what the existing evidence implies for how school leaders might recruit, evaluate, and ret...

Cultural Proximity and Loan Outcomes

By Raymond Fisman, Daniel Paravisini, and Vikrant Vig

American Economic Review, February 2017

We present evidence that cultural proximity (shared codes, beliefs, ethnicity) between lenders and borrowers increases the quantity of credit and reduces default. We identify in-group lending using dyadic data on religion and caste for officers and borrow...

Gross Worker Flows over the Business Cycle

By Per Krusell, Toshihiko Mukoyama, Richard Rogerson, and Ayşegül Şahin

American Economic Review, November 2017

We build a hybrid model of the aggregate labor market that features both standard labor supply forces and frictions in order to study the cyclical properties of gross worker flows across the three labor market states: employment, unemployment, and nonpa...

There Will Be Killing: Collectivization and Death of Draft Animals

By Shuo Chen and Xiaohuan Lan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

The elimination of private property rights can lead to inefficient use of productive assets. In China's collectivization movement from 1955 to 1957, instead of transferring draft animals to the ownership of the collectives, peasants slaughtered them to ke...

Private Information and Trade Timing

By Lones Smith

American Economic Review, September 2000

Does Grief Transfer across Generations? Bereavements during Pregnancy and Child Outcomes

By Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux, and Kjell G. Salvanes

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2016

Using population data from Norway, we examine the effects of stress induced by the death of the mother's parent during pregnancy on both the short-run and the long-run outcomes of the infant. Using a variety of empirical strategies to address the issue of...

Liquidity Constraints, Fiscal Externalities, and Optimal Tuition Subsidies

By Nicholas Lawson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

A large literature focuses on two important rationales for government subsidies to college students: positive fiscal externalities from a larger tax base, and liquidity constraints. This paper provides a first attempt to gauge the relative importance of t...

Does Merger Simulation Work? Evidence from the Swedish Analgesics Market

By Jonas Björnerstedt and Frank Verboven

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

We analyze a large merger in the Swedish market for analgesics (painkillers). The merging firms raised prices by 40 percent, and some outsiders raised prices by more than 10 percent. We confront these changes with predictions from a merger simulation mode...

Can Online Learning Bend the Higher Education Cost Curve?

By David J. Deming, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Noam Yuchtman

American Economic Review, May 2015

We examine whether online learning technologies have led to lower prices in higher education. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we show that online education is concentrated in large for-profit chains and less-selective p...

Taboos and Identity: Considering the Unthinkable

By Chaim Fershtman, Uri Gneezy, and Moshe Hoffman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

A taboo is an "unthinkable" action. Even the thought of violating a taboo triggers a punishment. We consider a model in which taboos are part of the definition of one's identity. Deliberating over breaking the taboo changes the individual's choice set, an...

Competition with Exclusive Contracts and Market-Share Discounts

By Giacomo Calzolari and Vincenzo Denicolò

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze firms that compete by means of exclusive contracts and market-share discounts (conditional on the seller's share of customers' total purchases). With incomplete information about demand, firms have a unilateral incentive to use these contrac...

A New History of Banking Panics in the United States, 1825-1929: Construction and Implications

By Andrew J. Jalil

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

There are two major problems in identifying the output effects of banking panics of the pre-Great Depression era. First, it is not clear when panics occurred because prior panic series differ in their identification of panic episodes. Second, establishing...