Comparing the Costs of Intermittent and Dispatchable Electricity Generating Technologies

By Paul L. Joskow

American Economic Review, May 2011

Economic evaluations of alternative electric generating technologies typically rely on comparisons between their expected "levelized cost" per MWh supplied. I demonstrate that this metric is inappropriate for comparing intermittent generating technologies...

The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Reply

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, October 2012

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) established that economic institutions today are correlated with expected mortality of European colonialists. David Albouy argues this relationship is not robust. He drops all data from Latin America and much of the ...

New Evidence and Perspectives on Mergers

[Symposium: Changes in Corporate Structure]

By Gregor Andrade, Mark Mitchell, and Erik Stafford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

As in previous decades, merger activity clusters by industry during the 1990s. One particular kind of industry shock, deregulation, becomes a dominant factor, accountings for nearly half of the merger activity since the late 1980s. In contrast to the 1980...

Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data

By William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

The onset of World War I spurred the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manus...

Measuring Duopoly Power in the British Electricity Spot Market

By Catherine D. Wolfram

American Economic Review, September 1999

This article presents an empirical study of market power in the British electricity industry. Estimates of price-cost markups are derived using direct measures of marginal cost and several approaches that do not rely on cost data. Since two suppliers faci...

The Spike at Benefit Exhaustion: Leaving the Unemployment System or Starting a New Job?

By David Card, Raj Chetty, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Impact of Medicaid on Labor Market Activity and Program Participation: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Katherine Baicker, Amy Finkelstein, Jae Song, and Sarah Taubman

American Economic Review, May 2014

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery for the chance to apply for Medicaid. Using this randomized design and 2009 administrative data, we find no significant effect of Medicaid on employment or earnings. Our 95 ...

The Significance of Federal Taxes as Automatic Stabilizers

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Alan J. Auerbach and Daniel R. Feenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

Using the TAXSIM model for the period 1962-95, we consider the federal tax system's impact as an automatic stabilizer. Despite the many changes in the tax system, there has been relatively little change in its role as an automatic stabilizer. We estimate ...

How Far Has the Transition Progressed?

[Symposium: Transition from Socialism]

By Peter Murrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

As the opening contribution to a four-page symposium, this paper provides an overview of the economic transformation in reforming countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, describing reforms, their consequences, and lessons economists might...

Hungary: In Transition to a Market Economy

By Paul G. Hare

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

Hungary began its transition to a market economy as long ago as 1968 with the adoption of the New Economic Mechanism, when detailed central planning was abandoned and the economy was regulated by means of financial and economic levers. However, after a pe...

Why Is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter?

By Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely as te...

Product Creation and Destruction: Evidence and Price Implications

By Christian Broda and David E. Weinstein

American Economic Review, June 2010

This paper describes the extent of product creation and destruction in a large sector of the US economy. We find four times more entry and exit in product markets than is found in labor markets because most product turnover happens within firms. Net produ...

The Macrodynamics of Sorting between Workers and Firms

By Jeremy Lise and Jean-Marc Robin

American Economic Review, April 2017

We develop an equilibrium model of on-the-job search with ex ante heterogeneous workers and firms, aggregate uncertainty, and vacancy creation. The model produces rich dynamics in which the distributions of unemployed workers, vacancies, and worker-firm m...

The Rise of the Service Economy

By Francisco J. Buera and Joseph P. Kaboski

American Economic Review, October 2012

This paper analyzes the role of specialized high-skilled labor in the disproportionate growth of the service sector. Empirically, the importance of skill-intensive services has risen during a period of increasing relative wages and quantities of high-skil...

Optimal Mirrleesean Taxation in a Ben-Porath Economy

By Marek Kapička

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2015

I characterize optimal taxes in a life-cycle economy where ability and human capital are unobservable. I show that unobservable human capital effectively makes preferences over labor nonseparable across age. I generalize the static optimal tax formulas to...

Two Happiness Puzzles

By Angus Deaton and Arthur A. Stone

American Economic Review, May 2013

We consider two happiness puzzles. First, many studies show that only relative income matters for well-being. Yet the Gallup data for the United States and from the rest of the world show no such result, at least for life evaluation. There may be relative...

Inside China's Cities: Institutional Barriers and Opportunities for Urban Migrants

By Feng Wang and Xuejin Zuo

American Economic Review, May 1999

Market Failure and Government Failure

[Symposium: The State and Economic Development]

By Mrinal Datta-Chaudhuri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

For several decades a debate has been raging in development economics on the relative virtues of the free market as opposed to state intervention, with neither side convincing the other. While this sterile debate continues, experiences accumulated from re...

Information, Direct Access to Farmers, and Rural Market Performance in Central India

By Aparajita Goyal

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

This paper estimates the impact of a change in procurement strategy of a private buyer in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Beginning in October 2000, Internet kiosks and warehouses were established that provide wholesale price information and ...

Manipulation of Procurement Contracts: Evidence from the Introduction of Discretionary Thresholds

By Ján Palguta and Filip Pertold

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

We present evidence of how policies that create opportunities to avoid open competition in procurement lead to the manipulation of procurement values. We exploit a policy reform in which public bodies were given the autonomy to preselect potential contrac...