(Un)happiness in Transition

By Sergei Guriev and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Despite strong growth performance in transition economies in the last decade, residents of transition countries report abnormally low levels of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey and other sources, we study various explanations of ...

Trading Tasks: A Simple Theory of Offshoring

By Gene M. Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, December 2008

We propose a theory of the global production process that focuses on tradeable tasks, and use it to study how falling costs of offshoring affect factor prices in the source country. We identify a productivity effect of task trade that benefits the fact...

Malthus to Solow

By Gary D. Hansen and Edward C. Prescott

American Economic Review, September 2002

Toward Choice-Theoretic Foundations for Behavioral Welfare Economics

By B. Douglas Bernheim and Antonio Rangel

American Economic Review, May 2007

Oil Monopoly and the Climate

By John Hassler, Per Krusell, and Conny Olovsson

American Economic Review, May 2010

Market Sentiment: A Tragedy of the Commons

By Tarek A. Hassan and Thomas M. Mertens

American Economic Review, May 2011

We present a model in which investors decide whether or to what degree they want to allow their behavior to be influenced by "market sentiment." Investors who choose to insulate their decisions from market sentiment earn higher expected returns, but incur...

In Honor of Sandy Grossman, Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By David M. Kreps

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

Sandy Grossman, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, is the winner of the John Bates Clark Medal for 1987, given to "that American economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge."...

The New Role for the World Bank

[Symposium: The Bretton Woods Institutions]

By Michael A. Clemens and Michael Kremer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

The World Bank was founded to address what we would today call imperfections in international capital markets. Its founders thought that countries would borrow from the Bank temporarily until they grew enough to borrow commercially. Some critiques and ana...

Providing Prescription Drug Coverage to the Elderly: America's Experiment with Medicare Part D

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Mark Duggan, Patrick Healy, and Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

The federal government's Medicare program did not provide general prescription drug coverage for the first 40 years of its existence. Thus, more than 30 percent of the 44 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries of the program lacked insurance coverage ...

How Well Is US Intrafirm Trade Measured?

By Kim J. Ruhl

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using two independent data sources—the intrafirm trade data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and the related party trade data from the US Census Bureau—I construct and compare measures of US intrafirm exports and imports. I find that, i...

Competition and Corporate Governance in Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Saul Estrin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

This paper examines the elements of institutional development critical to the enhancement of company performance in transition economies. This includes initial conditions, forms of privatization, institutional frameworks and the competitiveness of markets...

Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The mean and standard deviation in performance on math test scores are only slightly larger for males than for females. Despite minor differences in mean performance, many more boys than girls perform at the right tail of the distribution. This gender gap...

Bank Bailouts, International Linkages, and Cooperation

By Friederike Niepmann and Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

Financial institutions are increasingly linked internationally. As a result, financial crises and government intervention have stronger effects beyond borders. We provide a model of international contagion allowing for bank bailouts. While a social pla...

Are the Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks Big or Small?

By Olivier Coibion

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

This paper studies the small estimated effects of monetary policy shocks from standard VARs versus the large effects from the Romer and Romer (2004) approach. The differences are driven by three factors: the different contractionary impetus, the period of...

Relational Contracts and the Value of Relationships

By Marina Halac

American Economic Review, April 2012

This article studies optimal relational contracts when the value of the relationship between contracting parties is not commonly known. I consider a principal-agent setting where the principal has persistent private information about her outside option. ...

Demand Side Secular Stagnation

By Lawrence H. Summers

American Economic Review, May 2015

The experience of first Japan and now Europe and the USA suggests that Hansen's concept of secular stagnation is highly relevant. Recovery has been anemic and follows a generation of financially unsustainable and often lackluster growth. Investment demand...

Would People Behave Differently If They Better Understood Social Security? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Jeffrey B. Liebman and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

This paper presents the results of a randomized field experiment that provided information about key Social Security features to older workers. The experiment was designed to examine whether it is possible to affect individual behavior using a relatively ...

The Impact of Regulation on Mortgage Risk: Evidence from India

By John Y. Campbell, Tarun Ramadorai, and Benjamin Ranish

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

We employ loan-level data on over a million loans disbursed in India between 1995 and 2010 to understand how fast-changing regulation impacted mortgage lending and risk. Our paper uses changes in regulatory treatment discontinuities associated with loan s...

How Financial Incentives Induce Disability Insurance Recipients to Return to Work

By Andreas Ravndal Kostol and Magne Mogstad

American Economic Review, February 2014

Using a local randomized experiment that arises from a sharp discontinuity in Disability Insurance (DI) policy in Norway, we provide transparent and credible identification of how financial incentives induce DI recipients to return to work. We find that...

Sources of Wage Inequality

By Anders Akerman, Elhanan Helpman, Oleg Itskhoki, Marc-Andreas Muendler, and Stephen Redding

American Economic Review, May 2013

Recent theories of firm heterogeneity emphasize between-firm wage differences as a new mechanism through which trade can affect wage inequality. Using linked employer-employee data for Sweden, we show that many of the stylized facts about wage inequality ...