Agricultural Biotechnology: The Promise and Prospects of Genetically Modified Crops

[Symposium: Agriculture]

By Geoffrey Barrows, Steven Sexton, and David Zilberman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

For millennia, humans have modified plant genes in order to develop crops best suited for food, fiber, feed, and energy production. Conventional plant breeding remains inherently random and slow, constrained by the availability of desirable traits in cl...

Family Health, Children's Own Health, and Test Score Gaps

By Rodney J. Andrews and Trevon D. Logan

American Economic Review, May 2010

Traditional Beliefs and Learning about Maternal Risk in Zambia

By Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, Giuditta Rusconi, Alessandra Voena, and Roberta Ziparo

American Economic Review, May 2017

Maternal mortality remains very high in many parts of the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. While maternal deaths are observable, it may not be straightforward for individuals to learn about risk factors. This paper utilizes novel data o...

Does Abolishing User Fees Lead to Improved Health Status? Evidence from Post-apartheid South Africa

By Shinsuke Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Whether user fees for health services should be charged or abolished for the poor has recently been debated. This study examines the impact on child health status of removing user fees in South Africa. Our main innovation is to exploit plausibly exogenous...

Walking the Tightrope on Medicare Reform

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

A central controversy in the debate about Medicare is whether the program spends too much money or whether instead it should be expanded to cover more. I consider the value of increased Medicare spending. I argue that on average Medicare spending is worth...

Citizenship, Fertility, and Parental Investments

By Ciro Avitabile, Irma Clots-Figueras, and Paolo Masella

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Citizenship rights are associated with better economic opportunities for immigrants. This paper studies how in a country with a large fraction of temporary migrants the fertility decisions of foreign citizens respond to a change in the rules that regul...

The Gender Wage Gap and Domestic Violence

By Anna Aizer

American Economic Review, September 2010

Three quarters of all violence against women is perpetrated by domestic partners. This study exploits exogenous changes in the demand for labor in female-dominated industries to estimate the impact of the male-female wage gap on domestic violence. Decreas...

The Industrial Organization of Health-Care Markets

By Martin Gaynor, Kate Ho, and Robert J. Town

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2015

The U.S. health-care sector is large and growing—health-care spending in 2011 amounted to $2.7 trillion and 18 percent of GDP. Approximately half of health-care output is allocated via markets. In this paper, we analyze the industrial organization l...

Watta Satta: Bride Exchange and Women's Welfare in Rural Pakistan

By Hanan G. Jacoby and Ghazala Mansuri

American Economic Review, September 2010

Can marriage institutions limit marital inefficiency? We study the pervasive custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation. Watta satta can be seen as a mechanism for coordinating th...

When Labor Disputes Bring Cities to a Standstill: The Impact of Public Transit Strikes on Traffic, Accidents, Air Pollution, and Health

By Stefan Bauernschuster, Timo Hener, and Helmut Rainer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Many governments have banned strikes in public transportation. Whether this can be justified depends on whether strikes endanger public safety or health. We use time-series and cross-sectional variation in powerful registry data to quantify the effects of...

Cities Are Physical Too: Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance

By Nikhil Naik, Ramesh Raskar, and César A. Hidalgo

American Economic Review, May 2016

For social scientists, developing an empirical connection between the physical appearance of a city and the behavior and health of its inhabitants has proved challenging due to a lack of data on urban appearance. Can we use computers to quantify urban app...

Envirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for an Emerging Field

By Michael Greenstone and B. Kelsey Jack

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2015

Environmental quality in many developing countries is poor and generates substantial health and productivity costs. However, the few existing measures of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for environmental quality improvements indicate low valuations by ...

Recessions, Older Workers, and Longevity: How Long Are Recessions Good for Your Health?

By Courtney C. Coile, Phillip B. Levine, and Robin McKnight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Although past research has found that recessions reduce contemporaneous mortality, workers nearing retirement age may experience reduced longevity attributable to lengthy unemployment spells and lost health insurance at a particularly vulnerable time. To ...

Patents and the Global Diffusion of New Drugs

By Iain M. Cockburn, Jean O. Lanjouw, and Mark Schankerman

American Economic Review, January 2016

Analysis of the timing of launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries during 1983-2002 shows that patent and price regulation regimes strongly affect how quickly new drugs become commercially available in different countries. Price regulation delays launch,...

Enhancing Cognitive Functioning: Medium-Term Effects of a Health and Family Planning Program in Matlab

By Tania Barham

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

It is believed that early life circumstances are crucial to success later in life. Yet causal evidence that the impacts of early childhood health interventions continue into late childhood and adolescence is sparse. This paper exploits a quasi-random pla...

Behavioral Economics and Public Policy 102: Beyond Nudging

By Saurabh Bhargava and George Loewenstein

American Economic Review, May 2015

Policymakers have recently embraced Behavioral Economics as an alternative approach which recognizes the limits and consequences of human decision-making. Early applications of BE ("nudges") produced notable successes and helped to set the stage for more...

What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature

By Melissa Dell, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2014

A rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature, precipitation, and windstorms influence economic outcomes. These studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate im...

Covering the Uninsured in the United States

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

One of the major social policy issues facing the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century is the large number of Americans lacking health insurance. This article surveys the major economic issues around covering the uninsured. I rev...

Latin America's Social Policy Challenge: Education, Social Insurance, Redistribution

By Santiago Levy and Norbert Schady

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013

Long regarded as a region beset by macroeconomic instability, high inflation, and excessive poverty and inequality, Latin America has undergone a major transformation over the last 20 years. The region has seen improved macroeconomic management and substa...

Macroeconomic Consequences of Population Aging in the United States: Overview of a National Academy Report

By Ronald D. Lee

American Economic Review, May 2014

The US population will age rapidly for several decades and then more slowly, with less aging than most rich nations. Health of the elderly has greatly improved, but disability stagnated after 2000. Retirement age reversed its decline in the mid-1990s and ...