The FOMC versus the Staff: Where Can Monetary Policymakers Add Value?

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2008

Generalized Social Marginal Welfare Weights for Optimal Tax Theory

By Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, January 2016

This paper proposes to evaluate tax reforms by aggregating money metric losses and gains of different individuals using "generalized social marginal welfare weights." Optimum tax formulas take the same form as standard welfarist tax formulas by simply sub...

The Power of Forward Guidance Revisited

By Alisdair McKay, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson

American Economic Review, October 2016

In recent years, central banks have increasingly turned to forward guidance as a central tool of monetary policy. Standard monetary models imply that far future forward guidance has huge effects on current outcomes, and these effects grow with the horizon...

Shopping for Anonymous Shell Companies: An Audit Study of Anonymity and Crime in the International Financial System

[Symposium: Tax Havens]

By J. C. Sharman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

The last few years have seen an international campaign to ensure that the world's financial and banking systems are "transparent," meaning that every actor and transaction within the system can be traced to a discrete, identifiable individual. I present a...

The Labeling Effect of a Child Benefit System

By Peter Kooreman

American Economic Review, June 2000

Globalization, Labor Markets and Policy Backlash in the Past

[Symposium: Globalization in Perspective]

By Jeffrey G. Williamson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have many things in common. Both periods recorded fast growth, convergence, and labor-market integration between OECD members. Both periods witnessed intense debate about who gained and who lost from globalizati...

Fighting Poverty One Experiment at a Time: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty: Review Essay

By Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo offer a coherent vision for an economics of poverty and antipoverty policy. Their economics is grounded in an effort to understand the economic and psychological complexities in the lives of poor people, informed by socia...

Peacekeeping Force: Effects of Providing Tactical Equipment to Local Law Enforcement

By Matthew C. Harris, Jinseong Park, Donald J. Bruce, and Matthew N. Murray

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

We provide the first local level empirical analysis of the causal effects of providing military equipment to local police. Employing a novel combination of publicly available county-year panel data matched to hand-collected data on citizen complaints, we ...

The Missing Transmission Mechanism in the Monetary Explanation of the Great Depression

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper examines the missing transmission mechanism in Friedman's and Schwartz's monetary explanation of the Great Depression. We review the challenge provided by the decline in nominal interest rates in the early 1930s, and show that the monetary expl...

Reclaiming Virtue Ethics for Economics

[Symposium: Economics and Moral Virtues]

By Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Virtue ethics is an important strand of moral philosophy, and a significant body of philosophical work in virtue ethics is associated with a radical critique of the market economy and of economics. Expressed crudely, the charge sheet is this: The market...

Inefficient Hiring in Entry-Level Labor Markets

By Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, November 2014

Hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities. If this information is public, workers obtain its benefits. If workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them, firms will hire too few inexperienced workers. I determine the effect...

What Does Performance in Graduate School Predict? Graduate Economics Education and Student Outcomes

By Susan Athey, Lawrence F. Katz, Alan B. Krueger, Steven Levitt, and James Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2007

Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors? Interim Results from a Randomized Trial

By Francine D. Blau, Janet M. Currie, Rachel T. A. Croson, and Donna K. Ginther

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Trillion Dollar Conundrum: Complementarities and Health Information Technology

By David Dranove, Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

We examine the heterogeneous relationship between the adoption of EMR and hospital operating costs at thousands of US hospitals between 1996 and 2009. We first document a previously-identified puzzle: Adoption of EMR is associated with a slight cost incre...

Household Production and the Excess Sensitivity of Consumption to Current Income

By Marianne Baxter and Urban J. Jermann

American Economic Review, September 1999

Empirical research on the permanent-income hypothesis (PIH) has found that consumption growth is excessively sensitive to predictable changes in income. This finding is interpreted as strong evidence against the PIH. We propose an explanation for apparent...

Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives, and Evaluation

By Christopher A. Parsons, Johan Sulaeman, Michael C. Yates, and Daniel S. Hamermesh

American Economic Review, June 2011

Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers under...

What Do Trade Negotiators Negotiate About? Empirical Evidence from the World Trade Organization

By Kyle Bagwell and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, June 2011

According to the terms-of-trade theory, governments use trade agreements to escape from a terms-of-trade-driven prisoner's dilemma. We use the terms-of-trade theory to develop a relationship that predicts negotiated tariff levels on the basis of pre-ne...

Is the Mediterranean the New Rio Grande? US and EU Immigration Pressures in the Long Run

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

How will worldwide changes in population affect pressures for international migration in the future? We examine the past three decades, during which population pressures contributed to substantial labor flows from neighboring countries into the United Sta...

How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru

By John Mcmillan and Pablo Zoido

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Which of the democratic checks and balances--opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press--is the most forceful? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Montesinos systematically undermined them all with ...

Institution Formation in Public Goods Games

By Michael Kosfeld, Akira Okada, and Arno Riedl

American Economic Review, September 2009

Sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcoming free-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in social dilemma situations. We investigate, theoretically and experimentally, the endogenous formation of insti...