Insuring Consumption Against Illness

By Paul Gertler and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, March 2002

One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness. We investigate the extent to which families are able to insure consumption against major illness using a unique panel data set from In...

Can News about the Future Drive the Business Cycle?

By Nir Jaimovich and Sergio Rebelo

American Economic Review, September 2009

Aggregate and sectoral comovement are central features of business cycles, so the ability to generate comovement is a natural litmus test for macroeconomic models. But it is a test that most models fail. We propose a unified model that generates aggreg...

You Owe Me

By Ulrike Malmendier and Klaus M. Schmidt

American Economic Review, February 2017

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understa...

Housing Vouchers and the Price of Rental Housing

By Michael D. Eriksen and Amanda Ross

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

We estimate the effect of increasing the supply of housing vouchers on rents using a panel of housing units in the American Housing Survey. We do not find that an increase in vouchers affected the overall price of rental housing but do estimate difference...

Disaster Risk and Business Cycles

By François Gourio

American Economic Review, October 2012

Motivated by the evidence that risk premia are large and countercyclical, this paper studies a tractable real business cycle model with a small risk of economic disaster, such as the Great Depression. An increase in disaster risk leads to a decline of em...

The 11-20 Money Request Game: A Level-k Reasoning Study

By Ayala Arad and Ariel Rubinstein

American Economic Review, December 2012

We study experimentally a new two-player game: each player requests an amount between 11 and 20 shekels. He receives the requested amount and if he requests exactly one shekel less than the other player, he receives an additional 20 shekels. Level-k reas...

Does Forest Loss Increase Human Disease? Evidence from Nigeria

By Julia Berazneva and Tanya S. Byker

American Economic Review, May 2017

We examine the impact of forest loss on three infectious diseases attributed to modifiable environmental factors in the last decade in Nigeria. Geolinking a new high-resolution dataset of global forest change to child-level health data from the Nigeria De...

Civil Service Rules and Policy Choices: Evidence from US State Governments

By Gergely Ujhelyi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

This paper studies the policy impact of civil service regulations, exploiting reforms undertaken by US state governments throughout the twentieth century. These reforms replaced political patronage with a civil service recruited based on merit and prot...

Effects of Fiscal Stimulus in Structural Models

By Günter Coenen, Christopher J. Erceg, Charles Freedman, Davide Furceri, Michael Kumhof, René Lalonde, Douglas Laxton, Jesper Lindé, Annabelle Mourougane, Dirk Muir, Susanna Mursula, Carlos de Resende, John Roberts, Werner Roeger, Stephen Snudden, Mathias Trabandt, and Jan in't Veld

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

The paper subjects seven structural DSGE models, all used heavily by policymaking institutions, to discretionary fiscal stimulus shocks using seven different fiscal instruments, and compares the results to those of two prominent academic DSGE models. Th...

Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Giovanni Peri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Immigration has been a steady force acting on population and employment within countries throughout human history. Focusing on the last four decades, we show that the mix of immigrants to rich countries has been, overall, rather balanced between college a...

Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being

[Symposium: Happiness Economics]

By Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we d...

What Does Reputation Buy? Differentiation in a Market for Third-Party Auditors

By Esther Duflo, Michael Greenstone, Rohini Pande, and Nicholas Ryan

American Economic Review, May 2013

We study differences in quality in the market for third-party environmental auditors in Gujarat, India. We find that, despite the low overall quality, auditors are heterogeneous and some perform well. We posit that these high-quality auditors survive by u...

Beyond Statistics: The Economic Content of Risk Scores

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender, and Paul Schrimpf

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

"Big data" and statistical techniques to score potential transactions have transformed insurance and credit markets. In this paper, we observe that these widely-used statistical scores summarize a much richer heterogeneity, and may be endogenous to the c...

Financial Exchange Rates and International Currency Exposures

By Philip R. Lane and Jay C. Shambaugh

American Economic Review, March 2010

In order to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exc...

Development

By Joseph A. Schumpeter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2005

The present article introduces Development, a new, unpublished and hitherto unknown article by Joseph A. Schumpeter from 1932. Development is remarkable because it significantly adds to Schumpeter's known works on a number of issues that were central to h...

Are Chinese Growth and Inflation Too Smooth? Evidence from Engel Curves

By Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson, and Miao Liu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

China has experienced remarkably stable growth and inflation in recent years according to official statistics. We use systematic discrepancies between cross-sectional and time-series Engel curves to construct alternative estimates of Chinese growth and in...

The First of the Month Effect: Consumer Behavior and Store Responses

By Justine Hastings and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

Previous research has demonstrated that benefit recipients decrease expenditures on, and consumption of, food throughout the benefit month. Using detailed grocery store scanner data, we ask two questions: whether cycling is due to a desire for variety tha...

Patent Licensing, Technology Transfer, and Innovation

By Mark A. Lemley and Robin Feldman

American Economic Review, May 2016

Traditional justifications for patents are based on direct or indirect contribution to product creation. Non-practicing entities (NPEs) might provide such innovation, either directly, through working the patent or transfer of technology to others who do, ...

Term Premia and Inflation Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from an International Panel Dataset: Reply

By Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Review, January 2014

Bauer, Rudebusch, and Wu (2014) advocate the use of bias-corrected estimates in their comment on Wright (2011). Econometric estimation of a macro-finance VAR provides quite imprecise estimates of future short-term interest rates. Nonetheless, compariso...

Policy Watch: The Repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Advent of Broad Banking

By James R. Barth, R. Dan Brumbaugh, and James A. Wilcox

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

Enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) in November 1999 effectively repealed the long-standing prohibitions on the mixing of banking with securities or insurance businesses and thus permits "broad banking." We attribute repeal of these prohibition...