The Evolution of Value Systems: A Review Essay on Ian Morris's Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

By Alberto Bisin

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve is a large-scale history of the world through the different modes of production humanity has adopted over time and their implications in terms of moral values. Morris argues that the pred...

Returns to Education through Access to Higher-Paying Firms: Evidence from US Matched Employer-Employee Data

By Niklas Engbom and Christian Moser

American Economic Review, May 2017

We use administrative US matched employer-employee data merged with detailed information on individuals' academic records to assess the extent to which returns to education are mediated by the sorting of workers across firms. We present three results. Fir...

Giffen Behavior and Subsistence Consumption

By Robert T. Jensen and Nolan H. Miller

American Economic Review, September 2008

This paper provides the first real-world evidence of Giffen behavior, i.e., upward sloping demand. Subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of China, we find strong evidence of Giffen behavior for rice in...

Did Fair-Value Accounting Contribute to the Financial Crisis?

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Christian Laux and Christian Leuz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exace...

Regulation, Ownership, and Costs: A Historical Perspective from Indian Railways

By Dan Bogart and Latika Chaudhary

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

This paper studies the relationship between operational costs and state ownership in Indian railways between 1874 and 1912. We find the move to state ownership significantly decreased working expenses. The cost declines are not driven by anticipation effe...

Measuring the Environmental Benefits of Wind-Generated Electricity

By Joseph Cullen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

Production subsidies for renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, are rationalized by their environmental benefits. Subsidizing these projects allows clean, renewable technologies to produce electricity that otherwise would have been produced by ...

The Macroprudential Role of International Reserves

By Olivier Jeanne

American Economic Review, May 2016

There has been a lot of interest since the global financial crisis in policies allowing emerging market economies to smooth the effects of the global financial cycle. Although the literature has focused mostly on capital controls emerging market governmen...

Pricing Institutions and the Welfare Cost of Adverse Selection

By E. Glen Weyl and André Veiga

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

To mitigate adverse selection in insurance markets, individuals are often mandated to buy at least a baseline plan, but may choose to opt into a premium plan. In some markets, such as US health exchanges, each plan is responsible for the full expenses of ...

Inflation Illusion and Stock Prices

By John Y. Campbell and Tuomo Vuolteenaho

American Economic Review, May 2004

Local Multipliers

By Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2010

Tracing Value-Added and Double Counting in Gross Exports

By Robert Koopman, Zhi Wang, and Shang-Jin Wei

American Economic Review, February 2014

This paper proposes an accounting framework that breaks up a country's gross exports into various value-added components by source and additional double-counted terms. Our parsimonious framework bridges a gap between official trade statistics (in gross ...

Optimal Allocation with Ex Post Verification and Limited Penalties

By Tymofiy Mylovanov and Andriy Zapechelnyuk

American Economic Review, September 2017

Several agents with privately known social values compete for a prize. The prize is allocated based on the claims of the agents, and the winner is subject to a limited penalty if he makes a false claim. If the number of agents is large, the optimal mechan...

Taking Stock: A Critical Assessment of Recent Research on Inventories

By Alan S. Blinder and Louis J. Maccini

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s. No one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories. Macroeconomists rout...

The Effect of Credit Constraints on the College Drop-Out Decision: A Direct Approach Using a New Panel Study

By Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd Stinebrickner

American Economic Review, December 2008

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This paper differentiates itself from previous wor...

Offshoring, Transition, and Training: Evidence from Danish Matched Worker-Firm Data

By David Hummels, Jakob R. Munch, Lars Skipper, and Chong Xiang

American Economic Review, May 2012

We combine matched Danish worker-firm-trade data with detailed individual-worker training data. We find: 1) workers displaced from offshoring firms take up more vocational-training and have a harder time getting re-attached to the labor-force than other d...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Insurer-Provider Networks in the Medical Care Market

By Katherine Ho

American Economic Review, March 2009

I use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers. I include a simple profit-maximization framework and an additional effect: hospitals that can secur...

Optimal Taxation and Debt with Uninsurable Risks to Human Capital Accumulation

By Piero Gottardi, Atsushi Kajii, and Tomoyuki Nakajima

American Economic Review, November 2015

We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation and analyze the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of government debt. We show that in the presence o...

News-Driven Business Cycles: Insights and Challenges

By Paul Beaudry and Franck Portier

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in...

The Impact of Computation Time and Experience on Decision Values

By K. Carrie Armel and Antonio Rangel

American Economic Review, May 2008