How Do 401(k)s Affect Saving? Evidence from Changes in 401(k) Eligibility

By Alexander M. Gelber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

This paper investigates the effect of 401(k) eligibility on saving. To address the possibility that eligibility correlates across individuals with their unobserved tastes for saving, I examine a change in eligibility: some individuals are initially inelig...

The Great Recession: A Self-Fulfilling Global Panic

By Philippe Bacchetta and Eric van Wincoop

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2016

While the 2008-2009 financial crisis originated in the United States, output, consumption, and investment declined by similar magnitudes around the globe. Given the partial integration of both goods and financial markets, what can account for the remarkab...

State Gun Policy and Cross-State Externalities: Evidence from Crime Gun Tracing

By Brian Knight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of crossstate externalities associated with gun regulations that impact gun trafficking. Using tracing data, which identify the source state for crime guns recovered in destination states, we fin...

Interpreting the Great Moderation: Changes in the Volatility of Economic Activity at the Macro and Micro Levels

By Steven J. Davis and James A. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Most advanced economies have experienced a striking decline in the volatility of aggregate economic activity since the early 1980s. Volatility reductions are evident for output and employment at the aggregate level and across most industrial sectors and e...

The Scale and Selectivity of Foreign-Born PhD Recipients in the US

By Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon Hanson

American Economic Review, May 2013

We study the scale and selectivity of foreign-born PhD students in science and engineering. We focus on students from China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, which together account for most roughly one-third of science and engineering PhD students in the United ...

How Mortgage Finance Reform Could Affect Housing

By John V. Duca, John Muellbauer, and Anthony Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2016

Although major changes in mortgage finance have occurred since the subprime bust, several issues remain unresolved, centering on the roles of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA. We analyze how some reforms might affect house prices in a framework rich e...

Trade Agreements as Endogenously Incomplete Contracts

By Henrik Horn, Giovanni Maggi, and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, March 2010

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how t...

Prosperity and Depression

By Edward C. Prescott

American Economic Review, May 2002

Does Home Production Drive Structural Transformation?

By Alessio Moro, Solmaz Moslehi, and Satoshi Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Using new home production data for the United States, we estimate a model of structural transformation with a home production sector, allowing for both non-homotheticity of preferences and differential productivity growth in each sector. We report two mai...

Trade Restrictiveness and Deadweight Losses from US Tariffs

By Douglas A. Irwin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

This paper calculates a trade restrictiveness index, i.e., the uniform tariff that yields the same welfare loss as an existing tariff structure, for nearly a century of US data. The results show that the average tariff understates the TRI by about 75 per...

How to Define Illegal Price Manipulation

By Albert S. Kyle and S. Viswanathan

American Economic Review, May 2008

Why Wait? A Century of Life before IPO

By Boyan Jovanovic and Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2001

Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon

By Joseph Henrich

American Economic Review, September 2000

Retrospectives: Captains of Industry

By Robert Dixon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This paper traces the origin and use of the term "captains of industry." Introduced by the Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle in the mid-nineteenth century, its meanings and associations were very different from today. For Carlyle, they were f...

Debt Constraints and the Labor Wedge

By Patrick Kehoe, Virgiliu Midrigan, and Elena Pastorino

American Economic Review, May 2016

Changes in household debt and employment across regions of the U.S. during the Great Recession are highly correlated: regions where the decrease in household debt was most pronounced were also regions where the decline in employment was most severe. We sh...

Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood

By Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, and Benjamin Scuderi

American Economic Review, May 2016

We show that differences in childhood environments shape gender gaps in adulthood by documenting three facts using population tax records for children born in the 1980s. First, gender gaps in employment rates, earnings, and college attendance vary substan...

Organizational Design and Technology Choice under Intrafirm Bargaining: Comment

By Catherine C. de Fontenay and Joshua S. Gans

American Economic Review, March 2003

Does Banning Affirmative Action Lower College Student Quality?

By Jimmy Chan and Erik Eyster

American Economic Review, June 2003

Competition Policy, Rivalries, and Defense Industry Consolidation

[Symposium: Defense Procurement]

By William E. Kovacic and Dennis E. Smallwood

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Declining outlays for new weapons programs have triggered a process of consolidation that promises to shrink the U.S. defense industry drastically. Consolidation in the defense industry raises complex competition policy issues that are not amenable to con...

Taxing Consumption and Other Sins

[Symposium: U.S. Tax Policy in International Perspective]

By James R. Hines Jr.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

Federal and state governments in the United States use income and payroll taxes as their primary tools to collect revenue. Relative to the United States, governments in the rest of the world rely much more heavily on taxing consumption. Heavy American rel...