JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2003

Voting Agendas and Preferences on Trees: Theory and Practice

By Andreas Kleiner and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We study how parliaments and committees select one out of several alternatives when options cannot be ordered along a "left-right" axis. Which voting agendas are used in practice, and how should they be designed? We assume that preferences are single peak...

Making Elections Work: Accountability with Selection and Control

By Vincent Anesi and Peter Buisseret

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We study the limits of dynamic electoral accountability when voters are uncertain about politicians' characteristics (adverse selection) and their actions (moral hazard). Existing work argues that voters cannot achieve their first-best payoff. This is att...

Accountability and Grand Corruption

By Cesar Martinelli

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We propose a model of political careers and electoral accountability in an environment in which politicians may take bribes at different stages of their careers and in which politicians' actions are only imperfectly observed by voters. We show that the ex...

Crime Chains

By Mehmet Bac

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

How should law enforcement resources be allocated to minimize the harms from flexible, chain-form trafficking organizations? I show that optimal interventions focus on one target, the feeding source (decapitation) or the revenue-generating tail (amputatio...

Crime, Broken Families, and Punishment

By Emeline Bezin, Thierry Verdier, and Yves Zenou

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We develop a two-period overlapping generations model in which both the family structure and the decision to commit crime are endogenous and the dynamics of moral norms of good conduct is transmitted intergenerationally by families and peers. By "destroyi...

Reporting Sexual Misconduct in the #MeToo Era

By Ing-Haw Cheng and Alice Hsiaw

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We model the reporting of sexual misconduct. Individuals underreport misconduct due to strategic uncertainty over whether others will report and corroborate a pattern of behavior. Underreporting occurs if and only if misconduct is widespread. Making sanct...

Coordination and Organization Design: Theory and Micro-Evidence

By Wouter Dessein, Desmond (Ho-Fu) Lo, and Chieko Minami

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We explore the relationship between the volatility of a firm's local environment and its organizational structure. Using micro-level data on managers working for a large retailer, we empirically test and provide support for our theory that a more volatile...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2003

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Optimal Regulation of E-cigarettes: Theory and Evidence

By Hunt Allcott and Charlie Rafkin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key parameters. Using tax changes and scanner data, we estimate relatively elastic demand. A demographic shift-share identification strategy suggests limited substitution between e-cigarettes and cigare...

Hungry for Success? SNAP Timing, High-Stakes Exam Performance, and College Attendance

By Timothy N. Bond, Jillian B. Carr, Analisa Packham, and Jonathan Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Monthly government transfer programs create cycles of consumption that track the timing of benefit receipt. If these cycles correspond to critical moments for student learning and achievement, the timing of transfers may have important long-run implicatio...

Do Two Electricity Pricing Wrongs Make a Right? Cost Recovery, Externalities, and Efficiency

By Severin Borenstein and James B. Bushnell

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Economists favor pricing pollution in part so that consumers face the full social marginal cost (SMC) of goods and services. But even absent externalities, retail electricity prices typically exceed private marginal cost, due to a utility's need to cover ...

Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland

By Marius Brülhart, Jonathan Gruber, Matthias Krapf, and Kurt Schmidheiny

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

We study how declared wealth responds to changes in wealth tax rates. Exploiting rich intranational variation in Switzerland, we find a 1 percentage point drop in a canton's wealth tax rate raises reported taxable wealth by at least 43 percent after 6 yea...

Adviser Value Added and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomly Assigned College Advisers

By Serena Canaan, Antoine Deeb, and Pierre Mouganie

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

This paper provides the first causal evidence on the impact of college advisor quality on student outcomes. To do so, we exploit a unique setting where students are randomly assigned to faculty advisors during their first year of college. We find that hig...

The Hazards of Unwinding the Prescription Opioid Epidemic: Implications for Child Maltreatment

By Mary F. Evans, Matthew C. Harris, and Lawrence M. Kessler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Child maltreatment has significant and long-lasting consequences. We examine how two interventions designed to curtail prescription opioid misuse, the reformulation of OxyContin and the implementation of must-access prescription drug monitoring programs (...

Your Place in the World: Relative Income and Global Inequality

By Dietmar Fehr, Johanna Mollerstrom, and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Although there is abundant evidence on individual preferences for policies that reduce national inequality, there is very little evidence on preferences for policies addressing global inequality. To investigate the latter, we conducted a two-year, face-to...

Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Framing: A Field Experiment

By Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Steven D. Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

In a field experiment, we provide financial incentives to teachers framed either as gains, received at the end of the year, or as losses, in which teachers receive up-front bonuses that must be paid back if their students do not improve sufficiently. Pool...

The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers

By Seth Gershenson, Cassandra M. D. Hart, Joshua Hyman, Constance A. Lindsay, and Nicholas W. Papageorge

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Leveraging the Tennessee STAR class size experiment, we show that Black students randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in grades K–3 are 9 percentage points (13 percent) more likely to graduate from high school and 6 percentage points (19 perc...

Trade, Growth, and the Environment

By Brian R. Copeland and M. Scott Taylor

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2004

This essay reviews what we currently know about the environmental consequences of economic growth and international trade. Using a unified framework, we critically review both theory and empirical evidence on issues such as the Environmental Kuznets Curve...