Heterogeneity in the Impact of Economic Cycles and the Great Recession: Effects within and across the Income Distribution

By Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes

American Economic Review, May 2015

In this paper, we examine the effects of economic cycles on low- to moderate-income families. We use variation across states and over time to estimate the effects of cycles on the distribution of income, using fine gradations of the household income-to-po...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

The Effect of Allowing Pollution Offsets with Imperfect Enforcement

By Hilary Sigman and Howard F. Chang

American Economic Review, May 2011

Public policies for pollution control, including climate change policies, sometimes allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may find it more costly ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?

By Caroline M. Hoxby

American Economic Review, December 2000

Tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in American public education. Naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation. I derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area. My results ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Meddling Through: Regulating Local Telephone Competition in the United States

[Symposium: Telecommunications Deregulation Around The World]

By Robert G. Harris and C. Jeffrey Kraft

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

After a brief history of telecommunication policies and the development of local competition in the United States, this paper analyzes the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and subsequent FCC and state regulatory decisions. Unfortunately, these recent policy...

The Evolution of Managerial Expertise: How Corporate Culture Can Run Amok

By Dan Bernhardt, Eric Hughson, and Edward Kutsoati

American Economic Review, March 2006

This paper investigates how noisy evaluation of worker skills affects human capital investments and hiring. Individuals distort investments toward skills that most managers can evaluate. Dynamically, when workers become managers, managerial expertise can ...

Subjective Evaluations: Discretionary Bonuses and Feedback Credibility

By William Fuchs

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We provide a new rationale for the use of discretionary bonuses. In a setting with unknown match qualities between a worker and a firm and subjective evaluations by the principal, bonuses are useful in order to make the feedback from the firm to the worke...

CBO's Analysis of the Macroeconomic Effects of the President's Budget

By Benjamin R. Page

American Economic Review, May 2005

Beliefs, Doubts and Learning: Valuing Macroeconomic Risk

By Lars Peter Hansen

American Economic Review, May 2007

Social Interactions and the Institutions of Local Government

By Robert W. Helsley and William C. Strange

American Economic Review, December 2000

Can Intangible Capital Explain Cyclical Movements in the Labor Wedge?

By François Gourio and Leena Rudanko

American Economic Review, May 2014

Intangible capital is an important factor of production in modern economies that is generally neglected in business cycle analyses. We demonstrate that intangible capital can have a substantial impact on business cycle dynamics, especially if the intangib...

Optimal Income Taxation: An Example with a U-Shaped Pattern of Optimal Marginal Tax Rates: Comment

By Momi Dahan and Michel Strawczynski

American Economic Review, June 2000

Population Growth, Dependency, and Consumption

By David N. Weil

American Economic Review, May 1999

Optimal Contract under Moral Hazard with Soft Information

By Guillaume Roger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2013

I study a model of moral hazard with soft information: the agent alone observes the stochastic outcome of her action; hence the principal faces a problem of ex post adverse selection. With limited instruments the principal cannot solve these two proble...

Currency Misalignments and Optimal Monetary Policy: A Reexamination

By Charles Engel

American Economic Review, October 2011

This paper examines optimal monetary policy in an open-economy two-country world with sticky prices under pricing to market. We show that currency misalignments are inefficient and lower world welfare. We find that optimal policy must target consumer pric...

Why Do Poor Children Lose Health Insurance in the SCHIP Era? The Role of Family Health

By Anne Carroll, Hope Corman, Kelly Noonan, and Nancy E. Reichman

American Economic Review, May 2007

Interest Rate Pass-Through: Mortgage Rates, Household Consumption, and Voluntary Deleveraging

By Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani, Benjamin J. Keys, Tomasz Piskorski, Rodney Ramcharan, Amit Seru, and Vincent Yao

American Economic Review, November 2017

Exploiting variation in the timing of resets of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), we find that a sizable decline in mortgage payments (up to 50 percent) induces a significant increase in car purchases (up to 35 percent). This effect is attenuated by vol...

Financial Openness, Sudden Stops, and Current-Account Reversals

By Sebastian Edwards

American Economic Review, May 2004