Optimal Risk Adjustment in Markets with Adverse Selection: An Application to Managed Care

By Jacob Glazer and Thomas G. McGuire

American Economic Review, September 2000

Profitability of Fertilizer: Experimental Evidence from Female Rice Farmers in Mali

By Lori Beaman, Dean Karlan, Bram Thuysbaert, and Christopher Udry

American Economic Review, May 2013

We conducted an experiment providing fertilizer grants to female rice farmers in Mali. We found that women who received fertilizer used both more fertilizer and more complementary inputs such as herbicides and hired labor. This shows that farmers respond ...

Oaxaca-Blinder as a Reweighting Estimator

By Patrick Kline

American Economic Review, May 2011

The classic regression based estimator of counterfactual means studied by Ronald Oaxaca (1973) and Alan Blinder (1973) is shown to constitute a propensity score reweighting estimator based upon a linear model for the conditional odds of being treated.

Price Indexes, Inequality, and the Measurement of World Poverty

By Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, March 2010

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, ...

Legal, Political, and Institutional Constraints on the Financial Crisis Policy Response

[Symposium: The Bailouts of 2007-2009]

By Phillip Swagel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

As the financial crisis manifested itself and peaked in 2007 and 2008, the response of US policymakers and regulators was shaped in important ways by legal and political constraints. Policymakers lacked certain legal authorities that would have been usefu...

The Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution

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

American Economic Review, December 2011

The French Revolution had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. It removed the legal and economic barriers protecting oligarchies, established the principle of equality before the law, and prepared economies for the new industrial opportunities of ...

Persistence of Fortune: Accounting for Population Movements, There Was No Post-Columbian Reversal

By Areendam Chanda, C. Justin Cook, and Louis Putterman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

Using data on place of origin of today's country populations and the indicators of level of development in 1500 used by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2002), we confirm a reversal of fortune for colonized countries as territories, but find persistence o...

Malaria Eradication and Educational Attainment: Evidence from Paraguay and Sri Lanka

By Adrienne M. Lucas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Mid-twentieth century malaria eradication campaigns largely eliminated malaria from Paraguay and Sri Lanka. Using these interventions as quasi-experiments, I estimate malaria's effect on lifetime female educational attainment through the combination of...

Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalization

By David Hummels

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

While the precise causes of postwar trade growth are not well understood, declines in transport costs top the lists of usual suspects. However, there is remarkably little systematic evidence documenting the decline. This paper brings to bear an eclectic m...

Free Trade Agreements and the Consolidation of Democracy

By Xuepeng Liu and Emanuel Ornelas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2014

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, ...

Organizing for Synergies

By Wouter Dessein, Luis Garicano, and Robert Gertner

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2010

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activities are almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We first show that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functional managers (who de...

How Richard Nixon Pressured Arthur Burns: Evidence from the Nixon Tapes

By Burton A. Abrams

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Evidence from the Nixon tapes, now available to researchers, shows that President Richard Nixon pressured the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, to engage in expansionary monetary policies in the run-up to the 1972 election. This paper quotes...

Cluster-Sample Methods in Applied Econometrics

By Jeffrey M. Wooldridge

American Economic Review, May 2003

Does Agriculture Generate Local Economic Spillovers? Short-Run and Long-Run Evidence from the Ogallala Aquifer

By Richard Hornbeck and Pinar Keskin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

Agriculture may support the local nonagricultural economy in rural areas, though agricultural expansion may also crowd-out nonagricultural activity. On the United States Plains, areas over the Ogallala aquifer experienced windfall agricultural gains when ...

Experimental Evidence on the Long-Run Impact of Community-Based Monitoring

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Damien de Walque, and Jakob Svensson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

We evaluate the longer run impact of a local accountability intervention in primary health care provision in Uganda. Short-run improvements in health care delivery and health outcomes remained in the longer run despite minimal follow-up. We find no impact...

Does Competition Destroy Ethical Behavior?

By Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Review, May 2004

Market Socialism: A Case for Rejuvenation

By Pranab Bardhan and John E. Roemer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

In this paper, we will outline a feasible economic mechanism of "competitive socialism." Our claim is that competitive markets are necessary to achieve an efficient and vigorous economy, but that full-scale private ownership is not necessary for the succe...

The Economics of Structured Finance

[Symposium: Early Stages of the Credit Crunch]

By Joshua Coval, Jakub Jurek, and Erik Stafford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

This paper investigates the spectacular rise and fall of structured finance. The essence of structured finance activities is the pooling of economic assets like loans, bonds, and mortgages, and the subsequent issuance of a prioritized capital structure of...

Classroom Games: Rent-Seeking and the Inefficiency of Non-market Allocations

By Jacob K. Goeree and Charles A. Holt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Economics is often taught at a level of abstraction that can hinder some students from gaining basic intuition. However, lecture and textbook presentations can be complemented with classroom exercises in which students make decisions and interact. The app...

A Behavioral Model of the Popularity and Regulation of Demandable Liabilities

By Julio J. Rotemberg

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Overoptimism regarding one's ability to arrive early in a queue is shown to rationalize deposit contracts in which people can withdraw their funds on demand even if consumption takes place later. Capitalized institutions serving overoptimistic depositors ...