Early Childhood Education Programs

By Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

This paper discusses early childhood education programs: their goals; effectiveness; optimal timing, targeting, and content; and costs and benefits. Early intervention has significant short- and medium-term benefits: most notably it reduces grade repetiti...

Two Pillars of Asset Pricing

By Eugene F. Fama

American Economic Review, June 2014

Russian Retrospectives on Reforms from Yeltsin to Putin

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Padma Desai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

The kamikaze crew of liberal reformers, picked by former President Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s, succeeded in overturning the planned economy and the authoritarian political arrangements of seven decades of Soviet Communism. However, the resulting bre...

Multidimensional Platform Design

By André Veiga, E. Glen Weyl, and Alexander White

American Economic Review, May 2017

Successful platforms attract not just many users, but also those of the right kind. 'The right kind of user' is one who can either be directly monetized or who differentially attracts other valuable users. Bonacich centrality on the network of user sortin...

To Float or to Fix: Evidence on the Impact of Exchange Rate Regimes on Growth

By Eduardo Levy-Yeyati and Federico Sturzenegger

American Economic Review, September 2003

We study the relationship between exchange rate regimes and economic growth for a sample of 183 countries over the post-Bretton Woods period, using a new de facto classification of regimes based on the actual behavior of the relevant macroeconomic variabl...

Women in the Labor Market and in the Family

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By James P. Smith and Michael Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

There are two themes in this paper. First, we argue that the conventional wisdom of an absence of any substantial labor market progress for women is mistaken. Instead, throughout this century, women's wages have been steadily rising relative to those of m...

Trumping Norms: Lab Evidence on Aggressive Communication before and after the 2016 US Presidential Election

By Jennie Huang and Corinne Low

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper provides evidence from a negotiation experiment that the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump had a profound impact on individual behavior in the lab. Using a Battle of the Sexes game with unstructured communication, we find that post-...

Religion and Economy

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

Religion has a two-way interaction with political economy. With religion viewed as a dependent variable, a central question is how economic development and political institutions affect religious participation and beliefs. With religion viewed as an indep...

Field Experiments with Firms

[Symposium: Field Experiments]

By Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay, and Imran Rasul

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long-standing research questions relating to firm behavior. We present insights from two classes of experiments—within and across firms—and draw common lessons from both sets. Field ex...

The Effect of Bottle Laws on Income: New Empirical Results

By Bevin Ashenmiller

American Economic Review, May 2011

Eleven US states have "bottle laws," deposit-refund programs that combine a consumption tax with a recycling rebate. When states set the bottle deposit low enough it becomes a tax on high wage earners, for whom the opportunity cost of their time prevents ...

Macroeconomic Effects of Bankruptcy and Foreclosure Policies

By Kurt Mitman

American Economic Review, August 2016

I study the implications of two major debt-relief policies in the United States: the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) and the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). To do so, I develop a model of housing and default that...

The Risk Premium for Equity: Implications for the Proposed Diversification of the Social Security Fund

By Simon Grant and John Quiggin

American Economic Review, September 2002

Democratic Capital: The Nexus of Political and Economic Change

By Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

We study the dynamics of economic and political change, theoretically and empirically. Democratic capital measured by a nation's historical experience with democracy, and the incidence of democracy in its neighborhood, appears to reduce exit rates from...

Uncoupled Dynamics Do Not Lead to Nash Equilibrium

By Sergiu Hart and Andreu Mas-Colell

American Economic Review, December 2003

Checkmate: Exploring Backward Induction among Chess Players

By Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, and Sally E. Sadoff

American Economic Review, April 2011

Although backward induction is a cornerstone of game theory, most laboratory experiments have found that agents are not able to successfully backward induct. We analyze the play of world-class chess players in the centipede game, which is ill-suited for t...

How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists

By Joshua S. Gans and George B. Shepherd

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

The authors asked the world's leading economists to describe instances in which journals rejected their articles. More than sixty essays, by a broadly diverse group that includes fifteen Nobel Prize winners, indicate that most have suffered publication re...

What Explains the Industrial Revolution in East Asia? Evidence From the Factor Markets

By Chang-Tai Hsieh

American Economic Review, June 2002

This paper presents dual estimates of total factor productivity growth (TFPG) for East Asian countries. While the dual estimates of TFPG for Korea and Hong Kong are similar to the primal estimates, they exceed the primal estimates by 1 percent a year for ...

Economic Puzzles: Noisy Prisoners, Manhattan Locations, and More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

Each "Puzzles" will begin with a few speed problems. These puzzles have answers provided in the same issue. Puzzles 1 and 2 will give you a chance to get up to speed. Then, we continue with longer puzzles taken from two very broadly defined categories: st...

Is Reputation Good or Bad? An Experiment

By Brit Grosskopf and Rajiv Sarin

American Economic Review, December 2010

We investigate the impact of reputation in a laboratory experiment. We do so by varying whether the past choices of a long-run player are observable by the short-run players. Our framework allows for reputation to have either a beneficial or a harmful ef...

Do We Underestimate the Benefits of Cultural Competition?

By Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen

American Economic Review, May 2004