Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2021

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2021

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2021

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2021

The Vulcanization of the Human Brain: A Neural Perspective on Interactions Between Cognition and Emotion

[Symposium: Cognition, Brain Science and Economics]

By Jonathan D. Cohen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Emotions may explain inconsistencies in human behavior and forms of behavior that some have deemed irrational, though such behavior may seem more sensible after a discussion of the functions that emotions serve—or may have once served in our evolutionar...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2022

Consumption Response to Credit Expansions: Evidence from Experimental Assignment of 45,307 Credit Lines

By Deniz Aydin

American Economic Review, January 2022

In a field experiment that constructs a randomized credit limit shock, participants borrow to spend 11 cents on the dollar in the first quarter and 28 cents by the third year. Effects extend to those far from the limit, those who had the new limits as ava...

Information Networks and Collective Action: Evidence from the Women's Temperance Crusade

By Camilo García-Jimeno, Angel Iglesias, and Pinar Yildirim

American Economic Review, January 2022

How do social interactions shape collective action, and how are they mediated by networked information technologies? We answer these questions studying the Temperance Crusade, a wave of anti-liquor protest activity spreading across 29 states between 1873 ...

College Tuition and Income Inequality

By Zhifeng Cai and Jonathan Heathcote

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper evaluates the role of rising income inequality in explaining observed growth in college tuition. We develop a competitive model of the college market, in which college quality depends on instructional expenditure and the average ability of admi...

Measuring the Welfare Effects of Shame and Pride

By Luigi Butera, Robert Metcalfe, William Morrison, and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Review, January 2022

Public recognition is frequently used to motivate desirable behavior, yet its welfare effects—such as costs of shame or gains from pride—are rarely measured. We develop a portable empirical methodology for measuring and monetizing social image utility...

Imperfect Competition, Compensating Differentials, and Rent Sharing in the US Labor Market

By Thibaut Lamadon, Magne Mogstad, and Bradley Setzler

American Economic Review, January 2022

We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the US labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms and workers. We construct a matched employer-employee panel dataset by combining the universe of US business a...

Employment Structure and the Rise of the Modern Tax System

By Anders Jensen

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper builds a new microdatabase that covers 100 countries at all income levels and long-run time series in the United States (1870–2010) and Mexico (1960–2010) to document how the modern tax system arises over development. I establish a new set ...

The Relative Efficiency of Skilled Labor across Countries: Measurement and Interpretation

By Federico Rossi

American Economic Review, January 2022

I study how the relative efficiency of high- and low-skill labor varies across countries. Using microdata for countries at different stages of development, I document that differences in relative quantities and wages are consistent with high-skill workers...

A/B Contracts

By George Georgiadis and Michael Powell

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper aims to improve the practical applicability of the classic theory of incentive contracts under moral hazard. We establish conditions under which the information provided by an A/B test of incentive contracts is sufficient for answering the ques...

Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making

[Symposium: Cognition, Brain Science and Economics]

By Shane Frederick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

This paper introduces a three-item "Cognitive Reflection Test" (CRT) as a simple measure of one type of cognitive ability—the ability or disposition to reflect on a question and resist reporting the first response that comes to mind. The author will sho...

When Should There Be Vertical Choice in Health Insurance Markets?

By Victoria R. Marone and Adrienne Sabety

American Economic Review, January 2022

We study the welfare effects of offering choice over coverage levels—"vertical choice"—in regulated health insurance markets. We emphasize that heterogeneity in efficient coverage level is not sufficient to motivate choice. When premiums cannot reflec...

Counterfactuals with Latent Information

By Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, January 2022

We describe a methodology for making counterfactual predictions in settings where the information held by strategic agents and the distribution of payoff-relevant states of the world are unknown. The analyst observes behavior assumed to be rationalized by...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2022

Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India

By Reshmaan Hussam, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani, and Natalia Rigol

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2022

We test the predictions of the rational addiction model, reconceptualized as rational habit formation, in the context of handwashing in rural India. To track handwashing, we design soap dispensers with timed sensors. We test for rational habit formation b...