Should Aid Reward Performance? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Health and Education in Indonesia

By Benjamin A. Olken, Junko Onishi, and Susan Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into ...

Common Knowledge

[Symposium: Common Knowledge]

By John Geanakoplos

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1992

An event is common knowledge among a group of agents if each one knows it, if each one knows that the others know it, if each one knows that each one knows that the others know it, and so on. Thus, common knowledge is the limit of a potentially infinite c...

The Impact of the Massachusetts Health Care Reform on Health Care Use among Children

By Sarah Miller

American Economic Review, May 2012

In 2006 Massachusetts enacted a major health care reform aimed at achieving near-universal coverage in the state. While other studies have found that this reform substantially affected the use of health services in general, the impact of the reform on chi...

Deregulation and the Labor Market

[Symposium: Legacy of Deregulation]

By James Peoples

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

This paper examines the earnings and employment effect of deregulation in the trucking, railroad, airlines, and telecommunications industries. Findings on nonmanagement workers suggest labor earnings fell sharply in trucking, somewhat in airlines, slightl...

The Modern Expansion of Tort Liability: Its Sources, Its Effects, and Its Reform

[Symposium: The Economics of Liability]

By George L. Priest

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

This paper reviews the development of tort law during the 20th century with particular attention to the broad expansion of liability since the 1970s. It attempts to explain the origins of the expansion of liability; to present examples of its effects on p...

The Home Economics of E-Money: Velocity, Cash Management, and Discount Rates of M-Pesa Users

By Isaac Mbiti and David N. Weil

American Economic Review, May 2013

We study the mobile phone-based money transfer system in Kenya. Based on aggregate data, we estimate that the velocity with which units of e-money are transferred among users is approximately four times per month, and that the average number of transfers ...

Inflation Targeting in Emerging-Market Countries

By Frederic S. Mishkin

American Economic Review, May 2000

Correspondence: David H. Autor and Bruno S. Frey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

Does Growing Up in a High Crime Neighborhood Affect Youth Criminal Behavior?

By Anna Piil Damm and Christian Dustmann

American Economic Review, June 2014

This paper investigates the effect of early exposure to neighborhood crime on subsequent criminal behavior of youth exploiting a unique natural experiment between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to neighborhoods quasi-rand...

The Provision of Incentives in Firms

By Canice Prendergast

Journal of Economic Literature, March 1999

This paper provides an overview of the existing theoretical and empirical work on the provision of incentives. It reviews the costs and benefits of many types of pay-for-performance, such as piece rates, promotions, and long-term incentives. The main conc...

Central Bank Design

[Symposium: The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve]

By Ricardo Reis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Starting with a blank slate, how could one design the institutions of a central bank for the United States? This paper explores the question of how to design a central bank, drawing on the relevant economic literature and historical experiences while st...

Anomalies: The Winner's Curse

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

Next time that you find yourself a little short of cash for lunch, try the following experiment in your class. Take a jar and fill it with coins, noting the total value of the coins. Now auction off the jar to your class (offering to pay the winning bidde...

College on the Cheap: Consequences of Community College Tuition Reductions

By Jeffrey T. Denning

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This paper examines the effects of community college tuition on college enrollment. I exploit quasi-experimental variation from discounts for community college tuition in Texas that were expanded over time and across geography for identification. Communit...

Business Cycles in International Historical Perspective

[Symposium: Business Cycles]

By Susanto Basu and Alan M. Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

This paper examines business cycles theoretically and empirically, with a quantitative study based on data for a cross section of countries. Theoretical concerns indicate that the properties of business cycle models depend not only on important structural...

Monetary Policy Rules and Macroeconomic Stability: Some New Evidence

By Sophocles Mavroeidis

American Economic Review, March 2010

I revisit the question of indeterminacy in US monetary policy using limited-information identification-robust methods. I find that the conclusions of Clarida, Galí, and Gernter (2000) that policy was inactive before 1979 are robust, but the evidenc...

Risk Preferences Are Not Time Preferences: Reply

By James Andreoni and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Review, July 2015

Can the well-known experimental phenomenon of present-bias in intertemporal choice be confounded with the risks associated with receiving payment? Can measurements of risk preferences be used to represent desires for smoothness in intertemporal payments? ...

Executive Compensation as an Agency Problem

[Symposium: Stock Options]

By Lucian Arye Bebchuk and Jesse M. Fried

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Executive compensation has long attracted a great deal of attention from financial economists. Indeed, the increase in academic papers on the subject of CEO compensation during the 1990s seems to have outpaced even the remarkable increase in CEO pay itsel...

The Measurement of Student Ability in Modern Assessment Systems

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Brian Jacob and Jesse Rothstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Economists often use test scores to measure a student’s performance or an adult’s human capital. These scores reflect nontrivial decisions about how to measure and scale student achievement, with important implications for secondary analyses. For exam...

The Economics of Climate Change

By Nicholas Stern

American Economic Review, May 2008

Self-Fulfilling Currency Crises: The Role of Interest Rates

By Christian Hellwig, Arijit Mukherji, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, December 2006

We develop a model of currency crises, in which traders are heterogeneously informed, and interest rates are endogenously determined in a noisy rational expectations equilibrium. In our model, multiple equilibria result from distinct roles an interest ...