Sources of U.S. Economic Growth in a World of Ideas

By Charles I. Jones

American Economic Review, March 2002

Rising educational attainment and research intensity in recent decades suggest that the U.S. economy is far from its steady state. This paper develops a model reconciling these facts with the stability of U.S. growth rates. In the model, long-run growth a...

Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles, and Financial Crises, 1870-2008

By Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor

American Economic Review, April 2012

The financial crisis has refocused attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countrie...

Bidding for Incomplete Contracts: An Empirical Analysis of Adaptation Costs

By Patrick Bajari, Stephanie Houghton, and Steven Tadelis

American Economic Review, April 2014

Procurement contracts are often renegotiated because of changes that are required after their execution. Using highway paving contracts we show that renegotiation imposes significant adaptation costs. Reduced form regressions suggest that bidders respo...

Children and Household Income Packages: A Cross-National Analysis

By Erin Todd and Dennis Sullivan

American Economic Review, May 2002

Core Determining Class and Inequality Selection

By Ye Luo and Hai Wang

American Economic Review, May 2017

The relations between unobserved events and observed outcomes can be characterized by a bipartite graph. We propose an algorithm that explores the structure of the graph to construct the "exact Core Determining Class," i.e., the set of irredudant inequali...

The Effects of the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut on Corporate Behavior: Interpreting the Evidence

By Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Review, May 2006

Microcredit Impacts: Evidence from a Randomized Microcredit Program Placement Experiment by Compartamos Banco

By Manuela Angelucci, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We use a clustered randomized trial, and over 16,000 household surveys, to estimate impacts at the community level from a group lending expansion at 110 percent APR by the largest microlender in Mexico. We find no evidence of transformative impacts on 37 ...

The Nation in Depression

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Christina D. Romer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

This paper examines the American Great Depression and the ways in which the U.S. experience during the 1930s resembled that of other countries in some regards and fundamentally differed in other aspects. I also evaluate the evidence on the causes of the G...

Evidence on the Incidence of Wage Posting, Wage Bargaining, and On-the-Job Search

By Robert E. Hall and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others face a posted wage as a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. Both modes of wage determination have generated large bodies of research. We surveyed a representative sample of US wor...

Understanding Bank Runs: The Importance of Depositor-Bank Relationships and Networks

By Rajkamal Iyer and Manju Puri

American Economic Review, June 2012

We use unique depositor-level data for a bank that faced a run to understand the factors that affect depositor behavior. We find uninsured depositors are most likely to run. Deposit insurance helps, but is only partially effective. Bank-depositor relation...

The Effect of Extended Unemployment Insurance Benefits: Evidence from the 2012-2013 Phase-Out

By Henry S. Farber, Jesse Rothstein, and Robert G. Valletta

American Economic Review, May 2015

Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the ...

The Effect of Unemployment Benefits on the Duration of Unemployment Insurance Receipt: New Evidence from a Regression Kink Design in Missouri, 2003-2013

By David Card, Andrew Johnston, Pauline Leung, Alexandre Mas, and Zhuan Pei

American Economic Review, May 2015

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression k...

Credit Market Consequences of Improved Personal Identification: Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi

By Xavier Giné, Jessica Goldberg, and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, October 2012

We implemented a randomized field experiment in Malawi examining borrower responses to being fingerprinted when applying for loans. This intervention improved the lender's ability to implement dynamic repayment incentives, allowing it to withhold future l...

Cheap Talk

By Joseph Farrell and Matthew Rabin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

Economists often ask how private information is shared through markets, costly signaling, and other mechanisms. Yet most information sharing is done through ordinary, informal talk. Economists are inconsistent in their view of such 'cheap talk': sometimes...

Education and Catch-Up in the Industrial Revolution

By Sascha O. Becker, Erik Hornung, and Ludger Woessmann

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2011

Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence -- mostly from British textile industries -- however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new ...

Heterogeneity and Aggregation: Implications for Labor-Market Fluctuations

By Yongsung Chang and Sun-Bin Kim

American Economic Review, December 2007

We demonstrate that aggregate employment and consumption can increase without a corresponding movement in productivity in a model with heterogeneous agents where the only aggregate disturbance is a productivity shock. The interaction between incomplete ca...

The Market Impacts of Pharmaceutical Product Patents in Developing Countries: Evidence from India

By Mark Duggan, Craig Garthwaite, and Aparajita Goyal

American Economic Review, January 2016

In 2005, as the result of a World Trade Organization mandate, India implemented a patent reform for pharmaceuticals that was intended to comply with the 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Exploiting variation in the timing...

Firm Heterogeneity and the Long-Run Effects of Dividend Tax Reform

By François Gourio and Jianjun Miao

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

To study the long-run effect of dividend taxation on aggregate capital accumulation, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which there is a continuum of firms subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We find that a dividend tax cut raises...

The Effect of Newspaper Entry and Exit on Electoral Politics

By Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, and Michael Sinkinson

American Economic Review, December 2011

We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and all...

Technological Diversification

By Miklós Koren and Silvana Tenreyro

American Economic Review, February 2013

Economies at early stages of development are frequently shaken by large changes in growth rates, whereas advanced economies tend to experience relatively stable growth rates. To explain this pattern, we propose a model of technological diversification....