Top Incomes in the Long Run of History

By Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

A recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics. Top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total ta...

How Credible Is the Federal Reserve? A Structural Estimation of Policy Re-optimizations

By Davide Debortoli and Aeimit Lakdawala

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

The paper proposes a new measure of the degree of credibility of the Federal Reserve. We estimate a medium-scale macroeconomic model, where the central bank has access to a commitment technology, but where a regime-switching process governs occasional re-...

Universal Health Insurance in the Clinton Plan: Coverage as a Tax-Financed Public Good

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Mark V. Pauly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

The financing arrangements embodied in the Clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed. The subsidies to small, low-wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both lab...

Exports and Within-Plant Wage Distributions: Evidence from Mexico

By Judith A. Frías, David S. Kaplan, and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review, May 2012

This short paper examines the effect of exporting on within-plant wage distributions in employer-employee data on Mexican manufacturing plants. Using the late-1994 peso devaluation interacted with initial plant size as a source of exogenous variation in e...

Achieving Cooperation under Privacy Concerns

By Wioletta Dziuda and Ronen Gradwohl

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

Two players choose whether to cooperate on a project. Each of them is endowed with some evidence, and if both possess a sufficient amount, then cooperation is profitable. In order to facilitate cooperation, the players reveal evidence to one another. Howe...

Mistakes in Choice-Based Welfare Analysis

By Botond Kőszegi and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, May 2007

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2011

Markets and Inequality in Rural China: Parallels with the Past

By Dwayne Benjamin and Loren Brandt

American Economic Review, May 1999

Tax Reform: Implications for the State-Local Public Sector

[Symposium: Tax Reform]

By Paul N. Courant and Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

We analyze the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the level and distribution of state and local spending, and on the mix of revenue sources employed by state and local governments. We expect state and local spending to fall by between 0.9 percent an...

The Gender Gap in Secondary School Mathematics at High Achievement Levels: Evidence from the American Mathematics Competitions

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Glenn Ellison and Ashley Swanson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

This paper uses a new data source, American Mathematics Competitions, to examine the gender gap among high school students at very high achievement levels. The data bring out several new facts. There is a large gender gap that widens dramatically at perce...

Evolution of Time Preferences and Attitudes toward Risk

By Nick Netzer

American Economic Review, June 2009

This paper explores a general model of the evolution and adaption of hedonic utility. It is shown that optimal utility will be increasing strongly in regions where choices have to be made often and decision mistakes have a severe impact on fitness. Sev...

Paying Attention or Paying Too Much in Medicare Part D

By Jonathan D. Ketcham, Claudio Lucarelli, and Christopher A. Powers

American Economic Review, January 2015

We study whether people became less likely to switch Medicare prescription drug plans (PDPs) due to more options and more time in Part D. Panel data for a random 20 percent sample of enrollees from 2006-2010 show that 50 percent were not in their original...

The Long Slump

By Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, April 2011

In a market-clearing economy, declines in demand from one sector do not cause large declines in aggregate output because other sectors expand. The key price mediating the response is the interest rate. A decline in the rate stimulates all categories of sp...

Vertical Relationships and Competition in Retail Gasoline Markets: Empirical Evidence from Contract Changes in Southern California: Reply

By Justine Hastings

American Economic Review, June 2010

In their comment, Taylor, Kreisle and Zimmerman use gasoline price data taken from fleet card transactions at selected gasoline stations to re-examine a subset of results presented in Hastings (2004). Bringing new data to re-examine the question is a help...

Gender and Business Outcomes of Black and Hispanic New Entrepreneurs in the United States

By Marie T. Mora and Alberto Dávila

American Economic Review, May 2014

In light of the growing numbers of women of color in the entrepreneurial sector in the United States, employing public-use microdata from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners, this study finds that new firms owned by black and Hispanic women were more likel...

When Should Sellers Use Auctions?

By James W. Roberts and Andrew Sweeting

American Economic Review, August 2013

A bidding process can be organized so that offers are submitted simultaneously or sequentially. In the latter case, potential buyers can condition their behavior on previous entrants' decisions. The relative performance of these mechanisms is investiga...

On Overborrowing

By Martín Uribe

American Economic Review, May 2006

Herd Behavior and Investment: Comment

By Marco Ottaviani and Peter Sorensen

American Economic Review, June 2000

The Labor Supply of Immigrants in the United States: The Role of Changing Source Country Characteristics

By Mary Lopez and Fernando Antonio Lozano

American Economic Review, May 2009

Vertical Arrangements, Market Structure, and Competition: An Analysis of Restructured US Electricity Markets

By James B. Bushnell, Erin T. Mansur, and Celeste Saravia

American Economic Review, March 2008

This paper examines vertical arrangements in electricity markets. Vertically integrated wholesalers, or those with long-term contracts, have less incentive to raise wholesale prices when retail prices are determined beforehand. For three restructured m...