Measuring Investment in Education

[Symposium: Primary and Secondary Education]

By Eric A. Hanushek

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

Historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital. As extensive research demonstrates, education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and ...

Uncertainty at the Zero Lower Bound

By Taisuke Nakata

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

When the policy rate is at the zero lower bound (ZLB), an increase in uncertainty regarding the future path of exogenous shocks alters the conditional expectations of relevant prices facing households and firms. Accordingly, an increase in uncertainty alt...

Uncertainty and the Dynamics of R&D

By Nick Bloom

American Economic Review, May 2007

Group Polarization in a Model of Information Aggregation

By Nicolas Roux and Joel Sobel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

Experiments identify the empirical regularity that groups tend to make decisions that are more extreme, but in the same direction as the tendency of individual members of the group. We present a model of information aggregation consistent with these findi...

Economic Shocks and Conflict: Evidence from Commodity Prices

By Samuel Bazzi and Christopher Blattman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

Higher national incomes are correlated with political stability. Is this relationship causal? We test three theories linking income to conflict with new data on export price shocks. Price shocks have no effect on new conflict, even large shocks in high...

Rankings of U.S. Economics Departments

By Richard Dusansky and Clayton J. Vernon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

Economics departments in the United States are ranked using the criterion of publication in a set of eight leading journals. The publication period is 1990-94 inclusive, and faculty assignments to departments are for fall semester 1995. The ranking is com...

Superstition and Rational Learning

By Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine

American Economic Review, June 2006

We argue that some, but not all, superstitions can persist when learning is rational and players are patient, and illustrate our argument with an example inspired by the Code of Hammurabi. The code specified an "appeal by surviving in the river" as a w...

The Redesign of the Matching Market for American Physicians: Some Engineering Aspects of Economic Design

By Alvin E. Roth and Elliott Peranson

American Economic Review, September 1999

We report on the design of the new clearinghouse adopted by the National Resident Matching Program, which annually fills approximately 20,000 jobs for new physicians. Because the market has complementarities between applicants and between positions, the t...

Over the Cliff: From the Subprime to the Global Financial Crisis

[Symposium: Financial Regulation after the Crisis]

By Frederic S. Mishkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 can be divided into two distinct phases. The first and more limited phase from August 2007 to August 2008 stemmed from losses in one relatively small segment of the U.S. financial system—namely, subprime resident...

Review of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism by Christine Desan

By William Roberds

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

In the eighteenth century, the Bank of England revolutionized money through its large-scale introduction of circulating banknotes. The consequences of this revolution are felt even today. In Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism

Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments: Reply

By Dirk Engelmann and Martin Strobel

American Economic Review, December 2006

Esther Duflo: 2010 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Christopher Udry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

Esther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraordinary contributions to development economics. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the renaissance of development economics over the past decade. She has erected and inspi...

Some Fiscal Calculus

By Harald Uhlig

American Economic Review, May 2010

Retrospectives: From Usury to Interest

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

Since the Middle Ages, each epoch has participated in the debate over the conditions in which lending should be prohibited as usury. While disagreements over the definition of usury remain, the debate came to its modern climax on the eve of the industrial...

The Few Leading the Many: Foreign Affiliates and Business Cycle Comovement

By Jörn Kleinert, Julien Martin, and Farid Toubal

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

This paper argues that the correlation of business cycles across countries is largely due to linkages between multinational firms and their foreign affiliates. There are very few foreign affiliates in France, but they contribute considerably to aggregate ...

What's the Good of the Market? An Essay on Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy

By Timothy Besley

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

This essay will discuss the criticisms of the economic approach to markets offered by Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy. After reviewing the main arguments, the essay looks at these from three main angles. First, it relates them to different tradit...

Understanding the Mechanisms of Economic Development

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

In this paper, I advocate the investigation, testing, and modification of mechanisms as a progressive empirical research strategy for the field of economic development (and other areas of applied economics). I discuss three lines of work that have elucida...

Nonparametric Counterfactual Predictions in Neoclassical Models of International Trade

By Rodrigo Adao, Arnaud Costinot, and Dave Donaldson

American Economic Review, March 2017

We develop a methodology to construct nonparametric counterfactual predictions, free of functional form restrictions on preferences and technology, in neoclassical models of international trade. First, we establish the equivalence between such models and ...

Seven Centuries of European Economic Growth and Decline

By Roger Fouquet and Stephen Broadberry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

This paper investigates very long-run preindustrial economic development. New annual GDP per capita data for six European countries over the last seven hundred years paint a clearer picture of the history of European economic development. We confirm...

Challenges to Replication and Iteration in Field Experiments: Evidence from Two Direct Mail Shots

By Jake Bowers, Nathaniel Higgins, Dean Karlan, Sarah Tulman, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Review, May 2017

We conducted an experiment marketing microloans to farmers in the USA during Spring 2015 and found a simple direct mail letter increased borrowing from a government program. The subsequent spring, we built on this finding and enriched the design to test f...