Religious Conversion in Colonial Africa

By Nathan Nunn

American Economic Review, May 2010

Persistence of Population Shocks: Evidence from the Occupation of West Germany after World War II

By Abel Schumann

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, millions of German expellees were resettled into the new borders of Germany, but not into the parts of Germany that were occupied by France. Using a spatial regression discontinuity framework, I estimate the per...

Read All about It!! What Happens Following a Technology Shock?

By Michelle Alexopoulos

American Economic Review, June 2011

Existing indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic act...

Contracts and Technology Adoption

By Daron Acemoglu, Pol Antràs, and Elhanan Helpman

American Economic Review, June 2007

We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model, a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activi...

Comparisons of Weekly Hours over the Past Century and the Importance of Work-Sharing Policies in the 1930s

By Todd C. Neumann, Jason E. Taylor, and Price Fishback

American Economic Review, May 2013

Changes in the work week drove a larger portion of changes in total labor input during the Great Depression of the 1930s than during other decades. Work-sharing policies appear to be responsible. Herbert Hoover created various work-sharing committees--led...

Puzzles: On the Economics of Crime and Confiscation

By Ted Bergstrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The puzzles in this column focus on the issues of crime and confiscation. Answers to all three puzzles can be found at the end of the column.

Is Monetary Policy Effective during Financial Crises?

By Frederic S. Mishkin

American Economic Review, May 2009

Thinking and Feeling

By Paul M. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2000

Payday Loans and Credit Cards: New Liquidity and Credit Scoring Puzzles?

By Sumit Agarwal, Paige Marta Skiba, and Jeremy Tobacman

American Economic Review, May 2009

Gains from Trade When Firms Matter

[Symposium: International Trade]

By Marc J. Melitz and Daniel Trefler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

The rising prominence of intra-industry trade and huge multinationals has transformed the way economists think about the gains from trade. In the past, we focused on gains that stemmed either from endowment differences (wheat for iron ore) or inter-indust...

Liquidity Constraints and Deforestation: The Limitations of Payments for Ecosystem Services

By Seema Jayachandran

American Economic Review, May 2013

A popular environmental policy is to pay forest owners for avoiding deforestation on their land. This is an example of "payments for ecosystem services" (PES). This paper shows that liquidity constraints can limit the effectiveness of PES programs. If an ...

Retrospectives: How Joan Robinson and B. L. Hallward Named Monopsony

By Robert J. Thornton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

The term "monopsony" was introduced by Joan Robinson in her 1932 classic The Economics of Imperfect Competition, although she gives credit to classics scholar B.L. Hallward of Cambridge for the actual coining of the term. Even though the term has become w...

Health Insurance and Income Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Robert Kaestner and Darren Lubotsky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Health insurance and other in-kind forms of compensation and government benefits are typically not included in measures of income and analyses of inequality. This omission is important. Given the large and growing cost of health care in the United States...

The Economics of Contingent Re-auctions

By Sandro Brusco, Giuseppe Lopomo, and Leslie M. Marx

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

We consider an auction environment where an object can be sold with usage restrictions that generate benefits to the seller but decrease buyers' valuations. In this environment, sellers such as the FCC have used "contingent re-auctions," offering the rest...

How Much Would US Style Fiscal Integration Buffer European Unemployment and Income Shocks? (A Comparative Empirical Analysis)

By James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine the degree to which federal fiscal integration smoothes income and unemployment shocks across US States. We find that roughly 25 cents of every dollar of income shock at the state level is offset by federal fiscal policy. This stabilization com...

Not the Opium of the People: Income and Secularization in a Panel of Prussian Counties

By Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann

American Economic Review, May 2013

The interplay between religion and the economy has long occupied social scientists. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance using 175 Prussian counties, presented in six waves from 1886 to 1911. The data reveal a marked decl...

Loyalty, Exit, and Enforcement: Evidence from a Kenya Dairy Cooperative

By Lorenzo Casaburi and Rocco Macchiavello

American Economic Review, May 2015

Organizations depend on members' "loyalty" for their success. Studying a cooperative's attempt to increase deliveries by members, we show that the threat of sanctions leads to highly heterogeneous response among members. Despite the cooperative not actual...

Incentive Effects of Inheritances and Optimal Estate Taxation

By Wojciech Kopczuk

American Economic Review, May 2013

I consider optimal nonlinear taxation of income and bequests with a joy-of-giving bequest motive and explicitly characterize the optimal estate tax rate. The optimal formula trades off correction of externality from giving and discouraging effort of child...

Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms to Decentralize?

By Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, May 2010

The General Equilibrium Incidence of Environmental Mandates

By Don Fullerton and Garth Heutel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

Pollution regulations affect factor demands, relative returns, production, and output prices. In our model, one sector includes pollution as an input that can be a complement or substitute for labor or capital. For each type of mandate, we find condition...