Growth, Size, and Openness: A Quantitative Approach

By Natalia Ramondo and Andrés Rodríguez-Clare

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Incentive Effects of Marginal Tax Rates: Evidence from the Interwar Era

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

This paper uses the interwar United States as a laboratory for investigating the incentive effects of marginal income tax rates. We examine the impact of the large changes in rates in this period on taxable income using time-series/cross-section analysis ...

The Search for Economics Talent: Doctoral Completion and Research Productivity

By Wayne A. Grove and Stephen Wu

American Economic Review, May 2007

Learning about the Future and Dynamic Efficiency

By Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Review, September 2009

We study an allocation problem where a set of objects needs to be allocated to agents arriving over time. The basic model is of the private, independent values type. The dynamically efficient allocation is implementable if the distribution of agents' valu...

Diffusion of Behavior and Equilibrium Properties in Network Games

By Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, May 2007

Sources of Inefficiency in Healthcare and Education

By Amitabh Chandra and Douglas Staiger

American Economic Review, May 2016

Healthcare and education exhibit wide variation in spending that is loosely associated with outcomes. We study supply-side explanations for such variation in in healthcare, and extend this discussion to how it might apply to education. In both sectors, va...

Estimating the Ex Ante Expected Returns to College

By Andrew J. Hussey and Omari H. Swinton

American Economic Review, May 2011

Rather than estimating the returns to obtaining a college degree, this paper treats the college education decision as an uncertain investment involving varying likelihoods of successful graduation. We predict earnings conditional on both graduating and no...

Perfect Competition and the Creativity of the Market

By Louis Makowski and Joseph M. Ostroy

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2001

From the perspective of the Walrasian general equilibrium model, entrepreneurial and opportunistic behavior seems foreign. Can the model be refashioned so that it can accommodate such behavior? Many would say no, but we argue the contrary. Indeed, we pres...

Non-Optimal Mechanism Design

By Jason D. Hartline and Brendan Lucier

American Economic Review, October 2015

The optimal allocation of resources in complex environments—like allocation of dynamic wireless spectrum, cloud computing services, and Internet advertising—is computationally challenging even given the true preferences of the participants. In...

Birth Rates and the Vietnam Draft

By Marianne P. Bitler and Lucie Schmidt

American Economic Review, May 2012

The Vietnam conflict was the defining event for a generation, with nearly 8 million Americans serving in the armed forces. A large literature in economics has focused on effects of Vietnam-Era service post-war, while little research looks at contemporaneo...

Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from US Agriculture

By Marshall Burke and Kyle Emerick

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

Understanding the potential impacts of climate change on economic outcomes requires knowing how agents might adapt to a changing climate. We exploit large variation in recent temperature and precipitation trends to identify adaptation to climate change in...

Where Does the Money Go? Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid

[Symposium: Development]

By William Easterly and Tobias Pfutze

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

This paper does not address the issue of aid effectiveness -- that is, the extent to which foreign aid dollars actually achieve their goals -- but on "best practices" in the way in which official aid is given, an important component of the wider debate. F...

Fiscal Policy in a Model with Financial Frictions

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

American Economic Review, May 2010

Improving College Performance and Retention the Easy Way: Unpacking the ACT Exam

By Eric P. Bettinger, Brent J. Evans, and Devin G. Pope

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

Improving college performance and retention can be difficult. We propose a simple and low-cost change in the way colleges use the ACT exam in their admission decisions that can greatly increase their ability to identify students at a high risk of under...

Public Provision and Protection of Natural Resources: Groundwater Irrigation in Rural India

By Sheetal Sekhri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

This paper evaluates the effects of a public groundwater provision program on water tables in Northern India. I theorize that public provision leads to sustainable use of groundwater when the fixed costs for private well provision are high. I use village-...

State Censorship

By Mehdi Shadmehr and Dan Bernhardt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We characterize a ruler's decision of whether to censor media reports that convey information to citizens who decide whether to revolt. We find: (i) a ruler gains (his ex ante expected payoff increases) by committing to censoring slightly less than he doe...

The View from Above: Applications of Satellite Data in Economics

By Dave Donaldson and Adam Storeygard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

The past decade or so has seen a dramatic change in the way that economists can learn by watching our planet from above. A revolution has taken place in remote sensing and allied fields such as computer science, engineering, and geography. Petabytes of sa...

Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality: An Alternative Theory and Some Evidence

By Daron Acemoglu

American Economic Review, December 1999

I present a model where firms decide what types of jobs to create and then search for suitable workers. When there are few skilled workers and the skilled-unskilled productivity gap is small, firms create a single type of job and recruit all workers. An i...

Financial Contracting

By Oliver Hart

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

This paper discusses how economists' views of firms' financial structure decisions have evolved, from treating firms' profitability as given, to acknowledging that managerial actions affect profitability, to recognizing that firm value depends on the allo...

Political Limits to Globalization

By Daron Acemoglu and Pierre Yared

American Economic Review, May 2010