Land Reform and Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Micro Data

By Tasso Adamopoulos and Diego Restuccia

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

We assess the effects of a major land policy change on farm size and agricultural productivity using a quantitative model and micro-level data. We study the 1988 land reform in the Philippines that imposed a ceiling on land holdings, redistributed above...

Sticky Expectations and Consumption Dynamics

By Christopher D. Carroll, Edmund Crawley, Jiri Slacalek, Kiichi Tokuoka, and Matthew N. White

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

To match aggregate consumption dynamics, macroeconomic models must generate "excess smoothness" in consumption expenditures. But microfounded models are calibrated to match micro data, which exhibit no "excess smoothness." So standard microfounded models ...

The Fall in Global Fertility: A Quantitative Model

By Tiloka de Silva and Silvana Tenreyro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

Over the past six decades, fertility rates have fallen dramatically in most middle- and low-income countries. To analyze these developments, we study a quantitative model of endogenous human capital and fertility choice, augmented to allow for social norm...

Liquidity Traps and Monetary Policy: Managing a Credit Crunch

By Francisco J. Buera and Juan Pablo Nicolini

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

We study a model with heterogeneous producers that face collateral and cash-in-advance constraints. A tightening of the collateral constraint results in a credit-crunch-generated recession that reproduces some features of the financial crisis that unravel...

Toward a Cost-of-Living Index: Progress and Prospects

[Symposium: Consumer Price Index]

By Katharine G. Abraham

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Optimal Capital Requirements over the Business and Financial Cycles

By Frederic Malherbe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

I study economies where banks do not fully internalize the social costs of their lending decisions, which leads to real overinvestment. The bank capital requirement that restores investment efficiency varies over time. During booms, more investment is des...

Non-neutrality of Open-Market Operations

By Pierpaolo Benigno and Salvatore Nisticò

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

We analyze the effects on inflation and output of unconventional open-market operations due to the possible income losses on the central bank's balance sheet. We first state a general Neutrality Property, and characterize the theoretical conditions suppor...

Managing the UK National Debt 1694–2018

By Martin Ellison and Andrew Scott

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

We examine UK debt management using a new monthly dataset on the quantity and market price of every individual bond issued by the government since 1694. Our bond-by-bond dataset identifies variations in the market value of debt and so captures investors' ...

A Central Bank Theory of Price Level Determination

By Pierpaolo Benigno

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

This paper develops a theory in which the central bank can control the price level without fiscal backing. It is shown that the remittances policy and the balance sheet of the central bank are important elements to specify. A central bank that is appropri...

Sticky Wage Models and Labor Supply Constraints

By Zhen Huo and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

In sticky wages models (either à la Calvo or à la Rotemberg), labor is solely determined by the demand side. However, a change of circumstances may make labor demand higher than agents' willingness to work. We find that workers are required to work agai...

Liquidity and Consumption: Evidence from Three Post-earthquake Reconstruction Programs in Italy

By Antonio Acconcia, Giancarlo Corsetti, and Saverio Simonelli

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2020

In Italian regions hit by earthquakes, homeowners typically receive public funds to finance reconstruction. While these funds are strictly tied to reconstruction work, they are in part disbursed up front, leading to significant variation in cash on hand. ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2020

Field Experiments and the Practice of Economics

By Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee

American Economic Review, July 2020

Field Experiments and the Practice of Policy

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, July 2020

Experimentation, Innovation, and Economics

By Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, July 2020

The experimental method not only helps identify causal relationships, but also provides economists with a rich sense of context, focuses research on specific practical questions, stimulates collaboration with practitioners and specialists from other field...

The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics

[Symposium: Financial Market Efficiency]

By Burton G. Malkiel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Revolutions often spawn counterrevolutions and the efficient market hypothesis in finance is no exception. The intellectual dominance of the efficient-market revolution has more been challenged by economists who stress psychological and behaviorial elemen...

Risk Premia and the Real Effects of Money

By Sebastian Di Tella

American Economic Review, July 2020

This paper proposes a flexible-price theory of the role of money in an economy with incomplete idiosyncratic risk sharing. When the risk premium goes up, money provides a safe store of value that prevents interest rates from falling, reducing investment. ...

The Competitive Impact of Vertical Integration by Multiproduct Firms

By Fernando Luco and Guillermo Marshall

American Economic Review, July 2020

We study the impact of vertical integration on pricing incentives in multiproduct industries. To do so, we exploit recent variation in vertical structure in the US carbonated-beverage industry. While the elimination of double marginalization with vertical...

Tax-Exempt Lobbying: Corporate Philanthropy as a Tool for Political Influence

By Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, Raymond Fisman, and Francesco Trebbi

American Economic Review, July 2020

We explore the role of charitable giving as a means of political influence. For philanthropic foundations associated with large US corporations, we present three different identification strategies that consistently point to the use of corporate social re...

The Production Relocation and Price Effects of US Trade Policy: The Case of Washing Machines

By Aaron Flaaen, Ali Hortaçsu, and Felix Tintelnot

American Economic Review, July 2020

We estimate the price effect of US import restrictions on washers. The 2012 and 2016 antidumping duties against South Korea and China were accompanied by downward or minor price movements along with production relocation to other export platform countries...