Disability Insurance and Health Insurance Reform: Evidence from Massachusetts

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Review, May 2014

As health insurance becomes available outside of the employment relationship as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the cost of applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI)–potentially going without health insurance coverage durin...

Declining Mortality Inequality within Cities during the Health Transition

By Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn

American Economic Review, May 2015

In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, large cities had extremely high death rates from infectious disease. Within major cities such as New York City and Philadelphia, there was significant variation at any point in time in the mort...

Merger Policy with Merger Choice

By Volker Nocke and Michael D. Whinston

American Economic Review, April 2013

We analyze the optimal policy of an antitrust authority towards horizontal mergers when merger proposals are endogenous and firms choose among alternative mergers. In our model, the optimal policy of an antitrust authority that seeks to maximize expected ...

Weak Instruments: Diagnosis and Cures in Empirical Econometrics

By Jinyong Hahn and Jerry Hausman

American Economic Review, May 2003

Capacity and Utilization in Health Care: The Effect of Empty Beds on Neonatal Intensive Care Admission

By Seth Freedman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

Because geographic variation in medical care utilization is jointly determined by both supply and demand, it is difficult to empirically estimate whether capacity itself has a causal impact on utilization in health care. In this paper, I exploit short-...

Strategic Tournaments

By Ayala Arad and Ariel Rubinstein

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2013

A strategic (round-robin) tournament is a simultaneous n-player game built on top of a symmetric two-player game G. Each player chooses one action in G and is matched to play G against all other players. The winner of the tournament is the player who a...

Libertarian Paternalism

By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

American Economic Review, May 2003

Incentive Schemes for Local Government: Theory and Evidence from Comprehensive Performance Assessment in England

By Ben Lockwood and Francesco Porcelli

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an a...

New Millennium Economics: How Did It Get This Way, and What Way Is It?

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of Economics]

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

This paper is a discussion of the changes in the economics profession that occurred (or at least are suggested will occur) between 2000 and 2050. Structural changes include the growth of virtual universities, the movement of the center of economics out of...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

Entry Deterrence in Dynamic Second-Price Auctions

By Xiaogang Che and Tilman Klumpp

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

We examine a dynamic second-price auction with independent private values and sequential costly entry. We show that delayed revelation equilibria exist in which some buyers place coordinated low early bids. These buyers revise their bids to reflect the...

Comparing the Risks of Social Security with and without Individual Accounts

By Sita Nataraj and John B. Shoven

American Economic Review, May 2003

Bones, Bombs, and Break Points: The Geography of Economic Activity

By Donald R. Davis and David E. Weinstein

American Economic Review, December 2002

We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories—increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Ag...

Long-Term Impacts of Compensatory Preschool on Health and Behavior: Evidence from Head Start

By Pedro Carneiro and Rita Ginja

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

This paper provides new estimates of the medium- and long-term impacts of Head Start on health and behavioral problems. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strate...

HIV/AIDS and Fertility

By Jane G. Fortson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

This paper studies the response of fertility to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. I use repeated cross sections of the Demographic and Health Surveys for 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to examine this question empirically. Using individu...

Aggregate Savings and External Imbalances in China

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Dennis Tao Yang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Over the last decade, the internal and external macroeconomic imbalances in China have risen to unprecedented levels. In 2008, China's national savings rate soared to over 53 percent of its GDP, whereas its current account surplus exceeded 9 percent of G...

Measuring the Effect of the Zero Lower Bound on Medium- and Longer-Term Interest Rates

By Eric T. Swanson and John C. Williams

American Economic Review, October 2014

According to standard macroeconomic models, the zero lower bound greatly reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy and increases the efficacy of fiscal policy. However, private-sector decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short-term...

Revenue and Incentive Effects of Basis Step-Up at Death: Lessons from the 2010 "Voluntary" Estate Tax Regime

By Robert Gordon, David Joulfaian, and James Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2016

In 2010, the U.S. estate tax expired and executors of wealthy decedents were not required to file estate tax returns. In the absence of the estate tax, beneficiaries received assets with carryover rather than stepped-up basis. Unrealized capital gains acc...

The Real Swing Voter's Curse

By James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik

American Economic Review, May 2009

Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link

[Symposium: India]

By Tirthankar Roy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

This paper argues that to restore the link between economic history and modern India, a different narrative of Indian economic history is needed. An exclusive focus on colonialism as the driver of India's economic history misses those continuities that ar...