Corrective Taxation versus Liability

By Steven Shavell

American Economic Review, May 2011

Taxation and liability are compared as means of controlling harmful externalities, with a view toward explaining why the use of liability predominates over taxation. Taxation suffers from a disadvantage in the analysis: because taxes do not reflect all th...

Charters without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull, and Parag A. Pathak

American Economic Review, July 2016

Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar sch...

Self-Control and the Development of Work Arrangements

By Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer, and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Mirage of Fixed Exchange Rates

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets. Contrary to popular wisdom, industrialized-country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange paritie...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

Incentives, Commitments, and Habit Formation in Exercise: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Workers at a Fortune-500 Company

By Heather Royer, Mark Stehr, and Justin Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

Financial incentives have shown strong positive short-run effects for problematic health behaviors that likely stem from time inconsistency. However, the effects often disappear once incentive programs end. This paper analyzes the results of a large-scale...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Immigration and the Neighborhood

By Albert Saiz and Susan Wachter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

Within metropolitan areas, neighborhoods of growing immigrant settlement are becoming relatively less desirable to natives. We deploy a geographic diffusion model to instrument for the growth of immigrant density in a neighborhood. Our approach deals ex...

Can Hiring Quotas Work? The Effect of the Nitaqat Program on the Saudi Private Sector

By Jennifer R. Peck

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This paper studies the effects of quota-based labor regulations on firms in the context of Saudi Arabia's Nitaqat program, which imposed quotas for Saudi hiring at private firms. I use a comprehensive firm-level administrative dataset and exploit kinks in...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2013

Safe Asset Scarcity and Aggregate Demand

By Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

American Economic Review, May 2016

We explore the consequences of safe asset scarcity on aggregate demand in a stylized IS-LM/Mundell Fleming style environment. Acute safe asset scarcity forces the economy into a "safety trap" recession. In the open economy, safe asset scarcity spreads fro...

Social Capital and Social Quilts: Network Patterns of Favor Exchange

By Matthew O. Jackson, Tomas Rodriguez-Barraquer, and Xu Tan

American Economic Review, August 2012

We examine the informal exchange of favors in societies such that any two individuals interact too infrequently to sustain exchange, but such that the social pressure of the possible loss of multiple relationships can sustain exchange. Patterns of exchang...

Carrot or Stick? The Evolution of Reciprocal Preferences in a Haystack Model

By Florian Herold

American Economic Review, April 2012

We study the evolution of both characteristics of reciprocity: the willingness to reward and the willingness to punish. First, both preferences for rewarding and preferences for punishing can survive provided that individuals interact within separate g...

Technology Capital and the US Current Account

By Ellen R. McGrattan and Edward C. Prescott

American Economic Review, September 2010

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates that the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of US multinational companies over the period 1982-2006 averaged 9.4 percent annually after taxes; US subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged...

Competition in Loan Contracts

By Christine A. Parlour and Uday Rajan

American Economic Review, December 2001

We present a model of an unsecured loan market. Many lenders simultaneously offer loan contracts (a debt level and an interest rate) to a borrower. The borrower may accept more than one contract. Her payoff if she defaults increases in the total amount bo...

Incentives in Organizations

[Symposium: The Firm and its Boundaries]

By Robert Gibbons

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

In this paper, the author summarizes four new strands in agency theory that help him think about incentives in real organizations. As a point of departure, The author begins with a quick sketch of the classic agency model. He then discusses static models ...

General Index of JEL Volume 48, 2010

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

A Successful Accident: Recollections and Speculations about the CEA

[Symposium: Fifty Years of the Council of Economic Advisers]

By Herbert Stein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

As originally conceived, the President's Council of Economic Advisers would have a unique relation with the president, using Keynesian analysis to advise him on maintaining full employment. After fifty years, the Council has evolved into being a useful co...

Dealing with Long-Term Deficits

By Martin Feldstein

American Economic Review, May 2016

The United States faces a rising future ratio of debt to GDP that, if allowed to continue, would have serious adverse consequences for the American economy. Fortunately, policy changes can increase the size of the future GDP and shrink the future budget d...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2012