The Distributional Consequences of Large Devaluations

By Javier Cravino and Andrei A. Levchenko

American Economic Review, November 2017

We study the impact of large exchange rate devaluations on the cost of living at different points on the income distribution. Poor households spend relatively more on tradeable product categories and consume lower-priced varieties within categories. Cha...

Do Expiring Budgets Lead to Wasteful Year-End Spending? Evidence from Federal Procurement

By Jeffrey B. Liebman and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, November 2017

Many organizations have budgets that expire at the end of the fiscal year and may face incentives to rush to spend resources on low-quality projects at year's end. We test these predictions using data on procurement spending by the US federal government...

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...

Gresham's Law of Model Averaging

By In-Koo Cho and Kenneth Kasa

American Economic Review, November 2017

A decision maker doubts the stationarity of his environment. In response, he uses two models, one with time-varying parameters, and another with constant parameters. Forecasts are then based on a Bayesian model averaging strategy, which mixes forecasts ...

Why Do People Give? Testing Pure and Impure Altruism

By Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, Lise Vesterlund, and Huan Xie

American Economic Review, November 2017

Researchers measure crowd-out around one level of charity output to identify whether giving is motivated by altruism and/or warm-glow. However, crowd-out depends on output, implying first that the power to reject pure altruism varies, and second that a ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Delivering Public Health Insurance through Private Plan Choice in the United States

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

The United States has seen a sea change in the way that publicly financed health insurance coverage is provided to low-income, elderly, and disabled enrollees. When programs such as Medicare and Medicaid were introduced in the 1960s, the government dire...

Selection in Health Insurance Markets and Its Policy Remedies

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Michael Geruso and Timothy J. Layton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Selection (adverse or advantageous) is the central problem that inhibits the smooth, efficient functioning of competitive health insurance markets. Even—and perhaps especially—when consumers are well-informed decision makers and insurance mark...

The Questionable Value of Having a Choice of Levels of Health Insurance Coverage

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Justin Sydnor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

In most health insurance markets in the United States, consumers have substantial choice about their health insurance plan. However additional choice is not an unmixed blessing as it creates challenges related to both consumer confusion and adverse sele...

From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies: Challenges and Solutions, with an Application

[Symposium: From Experiments to Economic Policy]

By Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, James Berry, Esther Duflo, Harini Kannan, Shobhini Mukerji, Marc Shotland, and Michael Walton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us—possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts—to inform policy. Howeve...

Experimentation at Scale

[Symposium: From Experiments to Economic Policy]

By Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

This paper makes the case for greater use of randomized experiments "at scale." We review various critiques of experimental program evaluation in developing countries, and discuss how experimenting at scale along three specific dimensions—the size o...

Scaling for Economists: Lessons from the Non-Adherence Problem in the Medical Literature

[Symposium: From Experiments to Economic Policy]

By Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A. List, Danielle LoRe, and Dana Suskind

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Economists often conduct experiments that demonstrate the benefits to individuals of modifying their behavior, such as using a new production process at work or investing in energy saving technologies. A common occurrence is for the success of the interve...

How Food Banks Use Markets to Feed the Poor

By Canice Prendergast

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

A difficult issue for organizations is how to assign valuable resources across competing opportunities. This work describes how Feeding America allocates about 300 million pounds of food a year to over two hundred food banks across the United States. It d...

Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration

By Thomas Sampson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on its membership in the European Union. Although most of Britain's establishment backed remaining in the European Union, 52 percent of voters disagreed and handed a surprise victory to the "leave" ...

Enrollment without Learning: Teacher Effort, Knowledge, and Skill in Primary Schools in Africa

By Tessa Bold, Deon Filmer, Gayle Martin, Ezequiel Molina, Brian Stacy, Christophe Rockmore, Jakob Svensson, and Waly Wane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

School enrollment has universally increased over the last 25 years in low-income countries. Enrolling in school, however, does not assure that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries complete their primary education lacking even ...

Population Control Policies and Fertility Convergence

By Tiloka de Silva and Silvana Tenreyro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Rapid population growth in developing countries in the middle of the 20th century led to fears of a population explosion and motivated the inception of what effectively became a global population-control program. The initiative, propelled in its beginni...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2017

The Welfare Effects of Coordinated Assignment: Evidence from the New York City High School Match

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Nikhil Agarwal, and Parag A. Pathak

American Economic Review, December 2017

Coordinated single-offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform. We show that uncoordinated offers in NYC's school assignment mechanism generated mismatches. One-third of applicants were unassigned after the main round and later administ...

Absolute Poverty: When Necessity Displaces Desire

By Robert C. Allen

American Economic Review, December 2017

A new basis for an international poverty measurement is proposed based on linear programming for specifying the least cost diet and explicit budgeting for nonfood spending. This approach is superior to the World Bank's $1-a-day line because it is (i) clea...