One Mandarin Benefits the Whole Clan: Hometown Favoritism in an Authoritarian Regime

By Quoc-Anh Do, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, and Anh N. Tran

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

We study patronage politics in authoritarian Vietnam, using an exhaustive panel of ranking officials from 2000 to 2010 to estimate their promotions' impact on infrastructure in their hometowns of patrilineal ancestry. Native officials' promotions lead to ...

Propensity-Score Matching with Instrumental Variables

By Hidehiko Ichimura and Christopher Taber

American Economic Review, May 2001

The New Deal, Race, and Home Ownership in the 1920s and 1930s

By Trevor M. Kollmann and Price V. Fishback

American Economic Review, May 2011

Many federal government housing policies began during the New Deal of the 1930s. Many claim that minorities benefited less from these policies than whites. We estimate the relationships between policies in the 1920s and 1930s and black and white home owne...

Credit Ratings Accuracy and Analyst Incentives

By Heski Bar-Isaac and Joel Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2011

The financial crisis has brought a new focus on the accuracy of credit rating agencies (CRAs). In this paper, we highlight the incentives of analysts at the CRAs to provide accurate ratings. We construct a model in which analysts initially work at a CRA a...

Transferability of Skills across Sectors and Heterogeneous Displacement Costs

By Moises Yi, Steffen Mueller, and Jens Stegmaier

American Economic Review, May 2017

We use rich German administrative data to estimate new measures of skill transferability between manufacturing and other sectors. These measures capture the value of workers' human capital when applied in different sectors and are directly related to work...

International Migration and Gender Discrimination among Children Left Behind

By Francisca M. Antman

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper considers how international migration of the head of household affects the allocation of resources toward boys relative to girls within households remaining in the home country. I address the endogeneity of migration with a differences-in-diffe...

Aggregate Short Interest and Market Valuations

By Owen A. Lamont and Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Review, May 2004

Contracts for Agents with Biased Beliefs: Some Theory and an Experiment

By Anja Sautmann

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

This paper experimentally tests the predictions of a principal-agent model in which the agent has biased beliefs about his ability. Overconfident workers are found to earn lower wages than underconfident ones because they overestimate their expected pa...

The Stories We Tell: A Reconsideration of AS/AD Analysis

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

This paper explains that the AS/AD model as currently presented in the tests is seriously flawed. It does not fulfill the minimum requirement of a model: logical consistency. Its component parts are derived from models that reflect different, and inconsis...

Voluntary Compliance, Pollution Levels, and Infant Mortality in Mexico

By Andrew Foster, Emilio Gutierrez, and Naresh Kumar

American Economic Review, May 2009

Using Field Experiments to Test Equivalence between Auction Formats: Magic on the Internet

By David Lucking-Reiley

American Economic Review, December 1999

William Vickrey's predicted equivalences between first-price sealed-bid and Dutch auctions, and between second-price sealed-bid and English auctions, are tested using field experiments that auctioned off collectible trading cards over the Internet. The re...

Social Organizations, Violence, and Modern Growth

By Avner Greif and Murat Iyigun

American Economic Review, May 2013

Social institutions were often founded by the elite to avoid social upheavals. Institutions helped mitigate the threat of violent social responses to labor-saving innovations. But their organizational forms were influenced by preexisting cultural and soci...

Aid, Policies, and Growth: Comment

By William Easterly, Ross Levine, and David Roodman

American Economic Review, June 2004

Investment under Uncertainty with Strategic Debt Service

By Suresh Sundaresan and Neng Wang

American Economic Review, May 2007

Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820-1992

By François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson

American Economic Review, September 2002

This paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries. The estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to World War II and after that se...

Who Should Buy Long-Term Bonds?

By John Y. Campbell and LuisM. Viceira

American Economic Review, March 2001

According to conventional wisdom, long-term bonds are appropriate for conservative long-term investors. This paper develops a model of optimal consumption and portfolio choice for infinite-lived investors with recursive utility who face stochastic interes...

Proximity and Production Fragmentation

By Robert C. Johnson and Guillermo Noguera

American Economic Review, May 2012

Cross-border production chains tend to include geographically proximate countries. This suggests that increases in fragmentation should be largest among nearby trading partners, and thus may serve to localize gross trade. Using data on gross and value add...

The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy: Using the Future Elderly Model to Estimate Implications for Social Security and Medicare

By Dana P. Goldman and Peter R. Orszag

American Economic Review, May 2014

Mortality gradients by education and income have been rising in the United States and elsewhere. However, their impact on Social Security progressivity has received relatively little attention, and the impact on Medicare has received effectively none. Thi...

Dividend Taxation and Corporate Governance

By Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

In 2003, the United States enacted a tax reform that reduced, but did not eliminate, individual dividend income taxes. Cutting the dividend tax deprives corporate insiders of a justification for retaining earnings to build unprofitable corporate empires. ...

The Misallocation of Housing Under Rent Control

By Edward L. Glaeser and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Review, September 2003

The standard analysis of price controls assumes that goods are efficiently allocated, even when there are shortages. But if shortages mean that goods are randomly allocated across the consumers that want them, the welfare costs from misallocation may be g...