Report Cards: The Impact of Providing School and Child Test Scores on Educational Markets

By Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Asim Ijaz Khwaja

American Economic Review, June 2017

We study the impact of providing school report cards with test scores on subsequent test scores, prices, and enrollment in markets with multiple public and private providers. A randomly selected half of our sample villages (markets) received report cards....

This Mine Is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa

By Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Dominic Rohner, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, June 2017

We combine georeferenced data on mining extraction of 14 minerals with information on conflict events at spatial resolution of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree for all of Africa between 1997 and 2010. Exploiting exogenous variations in world prices, we find a posi...

Can Women Have Children and a Career? IV Evidence from IVF Treatments

By Petter Lundborg, Erik Plug, and Astrid Würtz Rasmussen

American Economic Review, June 2017

This paper introduces a new IV strategy based on IVF (in vitro fertilization) induced fertility variation among childless women to estimate the causal effect of having children on their career. For this purpose, we use administrative data on IVF treated w...

Eponymous Entrepreneurs

By Sharon Belenzon, Aaron K. Chatterji, and Brendan Daley

American Economic Review, June 2017

We demonstrate that eponymy—firms being named after their owners—is linked to superior firm performance, but is relatively uncommon (about 19 percent of firms in our data). We propose an explanation based on eponymy creating an association bet...

Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: Comment

By Jesse Rothstein

American Economic Review, June 2017

Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a, b) study value-added (VA) measures of teacher effectiveness. CFR (2014a) exploits teacher switching as a quasi-experiment, concluding that student sorting creates negligible bias in VA scores. CFR (2014b) finds VA sco...

Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: Reply

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, June 2017

Rothstein (2017) successfully replicates Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff's (2014a, b)—henceforth, CFR's—results using data from North Carolina, but raises concerns about CFR's methods. We show that Rothstein's methodological critiques are invali...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

Liquidity: A New Monetarist Perspective

By Ricardo Lagos, Guillaume Rocheteau, and Randall Wright

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

This essay surveys the new monetarist approach to liquidity. Work in this literature strives for empirical and policy relevance, plus rigorous foundations. Questions include: What is liquidity? Is money essential in achieving desirable outcomes? Which obj...

School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature

By Dennis Epple, Richard E. Romano, and Miguel Urquiola

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

We review the theoretical, computational, and empirical research on school vouchers, with a focus on the latter. Our assessment is that the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis; howe...

Sorting through Search and Matching Models in Economics

By Hector Chade, Jan Eeckhout, and Lones Smith

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

Toward understanding assortative matching, this is a self-contained introduction to research on search and matching. We first explore the nontransferable and perfectly transferable utility matching paradigms, and then a unifying imperfectly transferable u...

Classifying Economics: A History of the JEL Codes

By Beatrice Cherrier

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

In this paper, I suggest that the history of the classification system used by the American Economic Association (AEA) to list economic literature and scholars is a relevant proxy to understand the transformation of economics science throughout the twen...

Opportunities, Welfare, and Social Justice: A Review of Fishkin's Bottlenecks

By François Maniquet

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

In his Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, Joseph Fishkin claims he presents an entirely new way of thinking about equality of opportunity. The core of the new theory is the call for opportunity pluralism, which consists in enlarging th...

A Review Essay on Isabel Sawhill's Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenting without Marriage and Laurence Steinberg's Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence

By Anna Aizer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

Sawhill and Steinberg approach risky behavior among youth from two different angles: Steinberg argues for intervention during the adolescent years to alter behavior in ways that prioritize patience and self-regulation, while Sawhill advocates intervention...

Review of Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb by Douglas S. Massey et al.

By Yannis M. Ioannides

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

Climbing Mount Laurel, authored by a group of sociologists led by Douglas S. Massey, is about the efforts by Mount Laurel Township, NJ, residents to have affordable housing built in their community. From when it was first proposed in 1969 and until...

The Decentralized Central Bank: A Review Essay on The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve by Peter Conti-Brown

By Narayana R. Kocherlakota

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

This essay discusses the structure and governance of the Federal Reserve System in light of the many changes in its activities over the past thirty years. Based on this analysis, it argues in favor of four specific reforms: clarification of Congressional ...

Review of The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

By Stanley L. Engerman

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

The two books being reviewed are concerned with the importance of slavery in the antebellum US South for the economic development of the Northern states. One (Schermerhorn) deals primarily with Southern financial arrangements facilitating the sales of sla...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

Independent Auditor's Report

American Economic Review, June 2017

Independent Auditor's Report

American Economic Review, June 2015

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017