The Response of Expenditures to Anticipated Income Changes: Panel Data Estimates

By Martin Browning and M. Dolores Collado

American Economic Review, June 2001

Business Volatility, Job Destruction, and Unemployment

By Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent by the mid 1990s. Using low frequency movements in industry-level data, we estimate that a 1 percentage point drop in the quarterly job destruction rate lo...

Predicting and Preventing Shootings among At-Risk Youth

By Dana Chandler, Steven D. Levitt, and John A. List

American Economic Review, May 2011

Each year, more than 250 students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are shot. The authors of this paper worked with the leadership of CPS to build a predictive model of shootings that helped determine which students would be included in a highly targete...

Tax Policy and Heterogeneous Investment Behavior

By Eric Zwick and James Mahon

American Economic Review, January 2017

We estimate the effect of temporary tax incentives on equipment investment using shifts in accelerated depreciation. Analyzing data for over 120,000 firms, we present three findings. First, bonus depreciation raised investment in eligible capital relative...

Sources of Lifetime Inequality

By Mark Huggett, Gustavo Ventura, and Amir Yaron

American Economic Review, December 2011

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimate...

Vector Autoregressions

[Symposium: Econometric Tools]

By James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

This paper critically reviews the use of vector autoregressions (VARs) for four tasks: data description, forecasting, structural inference, and policy analysis. The paper begins with a review of VAR analysis, highlighting the differences between reduced-f...

Aligned Delegation

By Alexander Frankel

American Economic Review, January 2014

A principal delegates multiple decisions to an agent, who has private information relevant to each decision. The principal is uncertain about the agent's preferences. I solve for max-min optimal mechanisms— those which maximize the principal's payoff...

Proposals to Restructure Social Security

[Symposium: Social security]

By Peter A. Diamond

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

This paper discusses five proposed changes in Social Security: indexing the normal retirement age to life expectancy (as Sweden is doing); investing part of the trust funds in private securities; partial privatization (as has been proposed by Senators Ker...

Rare Disasters, Asset Prices, and Welfare Costs

By Robert J. Barro

American Economic Review, March 2009

A representative-consumer model with Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences and i.i.d. shocks, including rare disasters, accords with observed equity premia and risk-free rates if the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 3-4. If the intertemporal elastic...

Child Health and Household Resources in South Africa: Evidence from the Old Age Pension Program

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2000

Facts and Myths about Refereeing

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

Referees' and editors' behavior is illustrated by data from a random sample of refereeing requests by seven economics journals. Referees tend to be higher-quality (better-cited, prime-age) than authors. Except for a few superstar authors, there is no matc...

Does Disability Insurance Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Review, August 2013

We present the first causal estimates of the effect of Social Security Disability Insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants. We use administrative data to match applications to disability examiners and exploit variation in ...

John Law's System

By François R. Velde

American Economic Review, May 2007

Did the Housing Price Bubble Clobber Local Labor Market Job and Worker Flows When It Burst?

By John M. Abowd and Lars Vilhuber

American Economic Review, May 2012

We use the Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators and the Federal Housing Finance Agency's House Price Indices to study the effects of the housing price bubble on local labor markets. We show that the 35 MSAs in the top decile of the house price b...

Official Intervention in the Foreign Exchange Market: Is It Effective and, If So, How Does It Work?

By Lucio Sarno and Mark P. Taylor

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

Our paper assesses progress made by the profession in understanding whether and how exchange rate intervention works. We review theory and evidence on official intervention, concentrating primarily on work published in the last decade or so. We conclude t...

The Weight of History on European Cultural Integration: A Gravity Approach

By Pauline Grosjean

American Economic Review, May 2011

The cultural gravity model proposed in this paper uses micro-level survey data of 21,000 households to estimate the contribution to cultural heterogeneity of a long history of division between the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian or Prussian Empires since the y...

Measuring the Financial Sophistication of Households

By Laurent E. Calvet, John Y. Campbell, and Paolo Sodini

American Economic Review, May 2009

Modernizing Federal Economic Statistics

By William G. Bostic Jr., Ron S. Jarmin, and Brian Moyer

American Economic Review, May 2016

Official statistical data on the structure, evolution and performance of the U.S. economy are produced by a variety federal, state and local agencies. Much of the methodology, policy frameworks and infrastructure for U.S. economic measurement have been in...

Are Micro and Macro Labor Supply Elasticities Consistent? A Review of Evidence on the Intensive and Extensive Margins

By Raj Chetty, Adam Guren, Day Manoli, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2011

We evaluate whether state-of-the-art macro models featuring indivisible labor are consistent with modern quasi-experimental micro evidence by synthesizing evidence on both the intensive and extensive margins. We find that micro estimates are consistent wi...

The Flypaper Effect

By James R. Hines and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

What happens to a state's spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government? The standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes-...