Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond

By Oded Galor and David N. Weil

American Economic Review, September 2000

This paper develops a unified growth model that captures the historical evolution of population, technology, and output. It encompasses the endogenous transition between three regimes that have characterized economic development. The economy evolves from ...

Markets: Ready-Mixed Concrete

By Chad Syverson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

Concrete's natural color is gray. Its favored uses are utilitarian. Its very ubiquity causes it to blend into the background. But ready-mix concrete does have one remarkable characteristic: other than manufactured ice, perhaps no other manufacturing indus...

The Effect of State Taxes on the Geographical Location of Top Earners: Evidence from Star Scientists

By Enrico Moretti and Daniel J. Wilson

American Economic Review, July 2017

We quantify how sensitive is migration by star scientists to changes in personal and business tax differentials across states. We uncover large, stable, and precisely estimated effects of personal and corporate taxes on star scientists' migration patterns...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

What Do We Know about Global Income Inequality?

By Sudhir Anand and Paul Segal

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2008

In this paper, we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality. While all estimates agree that the level is very high, with a Gini of between 0.630 and 0.686 in the 1990s, there is no consensus regarding the direction of change...

Valuing Alternative Work Arrangements

By Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, December 2017

We employ a discrete choice experiment in the employment process for a national call center to estimate the willingness to pay distribution for alternative work arrangements relative to traditional office positions. Most workers are not willing to pay for...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Steven Durlauf

American Economic Review, May 2016

The Effects of Regulation in the Presence of Multiple Unpriced Externalities: Evidence from the Transportation Sector

By Antonio Bento, Daniel Kaffine, Kevin Roth, and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

In transportation systems with unpriced congestion, allowing single-occupant low-emission vehicles in high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to encourage their adoption exacerbates congestion costs for carpoolers. The resulting welfare effects of the policy a...

The Ricardian Approach to Budget Deficits

[Symposium: Budget Deficit]

By Robert J. Barro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about U.S. budget deficits. Many economists and other observers have viewed these deficits as harmful to the U.S. and world economies. The supposed harmful effects include high real interest rates, low sa...

Household Finance after a Natural Disaster: The Case of Hurricane Katrina

By Justin Gallagher and Daniel Hartley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Little is known about how affected residents are able to cope with the financial shock of a natural disaster. This paper investigates the impact of flooding on household finance. Spikes in credit card borrowing and overall delinquency rates for the most f...

Class-Size Caps, Sorting, and the Regression-Discontinuity Design

By Miguel Urquiola and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper examines how schools' choices of class size and households' choices of schools affect regression-discontinuity-based estimates of the effect of class size on student outcomes. We build a model in which schools are subject to a class-size cap...

Health Insurance Mandates, Mammography, and Breast Cancer Diagnoses

By Marianne P. Bitler and Christopher S. Carpenter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

We examine the effects of state health insurance mandates requiring coverage of screening mammograms. We find evidence that mammography mandates significantly increased mammography screenings by 4.5-25 percent. Effects are larger for women with less than ...

From "Made in China" to "Innovated in China": Necessity, Prospect, and Challenges

[Symposium: China]

By Shang-Jin Wei, Zhuan Xie, and Xiaobo Zhang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

After more than three decades of high growth based on its low-wage advantage and relatively favorable demographics--in combination with market-oriented reforms and openness to the world economy--China is at a crossroads with a much higher wage and a shr...

Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Joshua Angrist, Daniel Lang, and Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

This paper reports on an experimental evaluation of strategies designed to improve academic performance among college freshmen. One treatment group was offered academic support services. Another was offered financial incentives for good grades. A third...

The Economics of the Climate

By Geoffrey Heal

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

I review the economic characteristics of the climate problem, focusing on the choice of discount rates in the presence of a stock externality, risk and uncertainty/ambiguity, and the role of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in analyzing policy choices....

The Determinants of Productivity in Medical Testing: Intensity and Allocation of Care

By Jason Abaluck, Leila Agha, Chris Kabrhel, Ali Raja, and Arjun Venkatesh

American Economic Review, December 2016

A large body of research has investigated whether physicians overuse care. There is less evidence on whether, for a fixed level of spending, doctors allocate resources to patients with the highest expected returns. We assess both sources of inefficiency, ...

Factoryless Goods Producing Firms

By Andrew B. Bernard and Teresa C. Fort

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper documents the existence and characteristics of US firms that do not manufacture themselves, but nonetheless are heavily involved in the production of goods. These factoryless goods producing firms (FGPFs) are formally in the wholesale sector bu...

Spousal Control and Intra-household Decision Making: An Experimental Study in the Philippines

By Nava Ashraf

American Economic Review, September 2009

I elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the Philippines. When choices are private, men put money into their personal accounts. When choices are observable, men commit money to co...

Corporate Culture, Societal Culture, and Institutions

By Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales

American Economic Review, May 2015

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficul...

Thar She Bursts: Reducing Confusion Reduces Bubbles

By Michael Kirchler, Jürgen Huber, and Thomas Stöckl

American Economic Review, April 2012

To explore why bubbles frequently emerge in the experimental asset market model of Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988), we vary the fundamental value process (constant or declining) and the cash-to-asset value ratio (constant or increasing). We observe h...