Governance Institutions and Economic Activity

By Avinash Dixit

American Economic Review, March 2009

Physicians Treating Physicians: Information and Incentives in Childbirth

By Erin M. Johnson and M. Marit Rehavi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

This paper provides new evidence on the interaction between patient information and physician financial incentives. Using rich microdata on childbirth, we compare the treatment of physicians when they are patients with that of comparable nonphysicians. We...

Fiscal Consolidation in an Open Economy

By Christopher J. Erceg and Jesper Lindé

American Economic Review, May 2012

his paper uses a New Keynesian DSGE model of a small open economy to compare how the effects of fiscal consolidation differ depending on whether monetary policy is constrained by currency union membership or by the zero lower bound on policy rates. We sho...

Is the Impact of Health Shocks Cushioned by Socioeconomic Status? The Case of Low Birthweight

By Janet Currie and Rosemary Hyson

American Economic Review, May 1999

Human Capital Prices, Productivity, and Growth

By Audra J. Bowlus and Chris Robinson

American Economic Review, December 2012

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in economics. Price and quantity series are derived for four education levels. The price series are highly correlated and they ex...

Time to Build and Fluctuations in Bulk Shipping

By Myrto Kalouptsidi

American Economic Review, February 2014

This paper explores the nature of fluctuations in world bulk shipping by quantifying the impact of time to build and demand uncertainty on investment and prices. We examine the impact of both construction lags and their lengthening in periods of high i...

The Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya

By Robin Burgess, Remi Jedwab, Edward Miguel, Ameet Morjaria, and Gerard Padró i Miquel

American Economic Review, June 2015

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines wheth...

Momentum Traders in the Housing Market: Survey Evidence and a Search Model

By Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Effect of Grade Retention on High School Completion

By Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. In this paper, we use plausibly exogenous variation in retention ge...

Stock Market Wealth and Consumption

By James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

This paper explores the link between changes in the aggregate value of corporate stock and changes in consumer spending. It presents data on the distribution of corporate stock ownership based on the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances. It also uses time-ser...

Conflicts and Common Interests in Committees

By Hao Li, Sherwin Rosen, and Wing Suen

American Economic Review, December 2001

Committees improve decisions by pooling members' independent information, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences. Committee decision procedures transform continuous data int...

Character Endorsements and Electoral Competition

By Archishman Chakraborty and Parikshit Ghosh

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

When an elite-controlled media strategically endorses candidates in order to promote its own ideological agenda, office-seeking parties may completely pander to the media, under moderate ideological conflict between voters and the elite. Larger ideolog...

Consumer Confidence and Consumer Spending

[Symposium: Consumer Confidence]

By Sydney C. Ludvigson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Despite the widespread attention given to surveys of consumer confidence, the mechanisms by which household attitudes influence the real economy are less well understood. This paper begins with an overview of how consumer confidence is measured and report...

Assessing Sale Strategies in Online Markets Using Matched Listings

By Liran Einav, Theresa Kuchler, Jonathan Levin, and Neel Sundaresan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We use data from eBay to identify hundreds of thousands of instances in which retailers posted otherwise identical product listings with targeted variation in pricing and auction design. We use these matched listings to measure the dispersion in auction p...

Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank's Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2006

Proponents and critics alike agree that the policies spawned by the Washington Consensus have not produced the desired results. The debate now is not over whether the Washington Consensus is dead or alive, but over what will replace it. An important ma...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2016

Inferring Carbon Abatement Costs in Electricity Markets: A Revealed Preference Approach Using the Shale Revolution

By Joseph A. Cullen and Erin T. Mansur

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

This paper examines how carbon pricing would reduce emissions in the electricity sector. Both carbon prices and cheap natural gas reduce the historic cost advantage of coal plants. The shale revolution resulted in unprecedented variation in natural gas pr...

Restoring Banking Stability: Beyond Supervised Capital Requirements

[Symposium: Global Financial Instability]

By Gerard Caprio and Patrick Honohan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

Emerging economies have been particularly prone to financial sector crises, reflecting marked information asymmetries and political interference, as well as the substantial volatility in underlying economic conditions, and the vulnerability of banking and...

A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change

By William D. Nordhaus

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. An exami...

Collective Memory, Cultural Transmission, and Investments

By Roberta Dessí

American Economic Review, March 2008

I study the transmission of collective memory as a mechanism for cultural transmission, in the presence of social externalities associated with individual cultural investment decisions. The younger generation's decisions depend on beliefs about the qualit...