The Case of the Missing Currency

By Case M. Sprenkle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

In late 1992, currency in the hands of the public was close to $300 billion, representing nearly 30 percent of M1. One would think that an economic variable of this magnitude would be well-analyzed and well-understood. Quite the contrary. The last serious...

Fiscal Policy Multipliers on Subnational Government Spending

By Jeffrey Clemens and Stephen Miran

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending, with the stringency of a state's rules driving the pace at which it must adjust to shocks. We show that fiscal institutions can generate natural experiments in ...

Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity

By Chang-Tai Hsieh and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, June 2007

The positive correlation between real investment rates and real income levels across countries is driven largely by differences in the price of investment relative to output. The high relative price of investment in poor countries is due to the low pric...

Not Just the Great Contraction: Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960

By Michael D. Bordo and Hugh Rockoff

American Economic Review, May 2013

Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz published A Monetary History of the United States: 1867 to 1960 with Princeton University Press in 1963, to critical acclaim. Since then the book's reputation has grown and it clearly has become one of the most influen...

An Exploration of Technology Diffusion

By Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn

American Economic Review, December 2010

We develop a model that, at the aggregate level, is similar to the one-sector neoclassical growth model; at the disaggregate level, it has implications for the path of observable measures of technology adoption. We estimate it using data on the diffusion ...

Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service: Evidence from India

By Rema Hanna and Shing-Yi Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Students in India who cheat on a simple laboratory task are more likely to prefer public sector jobs. This paper shows that cheating on this task predicts corrupt behavior by civil servants, implying that it is a meaningful predictor of future corruption....

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

Tracing the Impact of Bank Liquidity Shocks: Evidence from an Emerging Market

By Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Atif Mian

American Economic Review, September 2008

We examine the impact of liquidity shocks by exploiting cross-bank liquidity variation induced by unanticipated nuclear tests in Pakistan. We show that for the same firm borrowing from two different banks, its loan from the bank experiencing a 1 percen...

Selection Bias, Demographic Effects, and Ability Effects in Common Value Auction Experiments

By Marco Casari, John C. Ham, and John H. Kagel

American Economic Review, September 2007

Inexperienced women, along with economics and business majors, are much more susceptible to the winner's curse, as are subjects with lower SAT/ACT scores. There are strong selection effects in bid function estimates for inexperienced and experienced su...

Immigration, Offshoring, and American Jobs

By Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri, and Greg C. Wright

American Economic Review, August 2013

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born wor...

The Missing "Missing Middle"

[Symposium: Classic Ideas in Development]

By Chang-Tai Hsieh and Benjamin A. Olken

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

Although a large literature seeks to explain the "missing middle" of mid-sized firms in developing countries, there is surprisingly little empirical backing for existence of the missing middle. Using microdata on the full distribution of both formal and i...

German Jewish Émigrés and US Invention

By Petra Moser, Alessandra Voena, and Fabian Waldinger

American Economic Review, October 2014

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized US science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the United States, we compare changes in patenting by US inventors in research fields of émigré...

Is the Food And Drug Administration Safe And Effective?

[Symposium: Regulatory Economics]

By Tomas J. Philipson and Eric Sun

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provides public oversight of the safety and efficacy of drugs; medical devices; biologics like vaccines and blood products; cosmetics; radiation-emitting electronic products; veterinary products...

Human Capital and the Productivity of Suicide Bombers

By Efraim Benmelech and Claude Berrebi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

This paper studies the relation between the human capital of suicide bombers and the outcomes of their suicide attacks. We argue that human capital is an important factor in the production of terrorism and that if terrorists behave rationally, we should o...

Expectations, Learning, and Business Cycle Fluctuations

By Stefano Eusepi and Bruce Preston

American Economic Review, October 2011

This paper develops a theory of expectations-driven business cycles based on learning. Agents have incomplete knowledge about how market prices are determined and shifts in expectations of future prices affect dynamics. Learning breaks the tight link betw...

Developments in Non-expected Utility Theory: The Hunt for a Descriptive Theory of Choice under Risk

By Chris Starmer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2000

This article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk. Since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways. Considerable research e...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

Correspondence

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

Recessions, Older Workers, and Longevity: How Long Are Recessions Good for Your Health?

By Courtney C. Coile, Phillip B. Levine, and Robin McKnight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Although past research has found that recessions reduce contemporaneous mortality, workers nearing retirement age may experience reduced longevity attributable to lengthy unemployment spells and lost health insurance at a particularly vulnerable time. To ...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012