Why People Vote: Ethical Motives and Social Incentives

By S. Nageeb Ali and Charles Lin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2013

Some individuals vote because they are motivated by a civic duty to do so, whereas others may vote because they wish to appear prosocial to others. This paper proposes a simple framework that captures these motivations, and provides results consistent ...

A Review of Tito Boeri, Lans Bovenberg, Benoît Coeuré, and Andrew Roberts's Dealing with the New Giants and Peter J. Orszag, Mark Iwry, and William G. Gale's Aging Gracefully

By Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2008

Global aging will impose greater economic demands on the young and may entail dramatic consumption shortfalls for the old. Against this gloomy backdrop, many analysts hail the world’s funded pension systems as a means to protect future retirement sec...

The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka

By Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

A field experiment in Sri Lanka provides informal firms incentives to formalize. Information about the registration process and reimbursement of direct costs does not increase registration. Payments equivalent to one-half to one month (alternatively, two...

Should Cash Transfers Be Conditional? Conditionality, Preventive Care, and Health Outcomes

By Orazio P. Attanasio, Veruska Oppedisano, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

We study a Conditional Cash Transfer program in which the cash transfers to the mother only depend on the fulfillment of the national preventive visit schedule by her children born before she registered in the program. We estimate that preventive visits o...

The Costs of Sovereign Default: Evidence from Argentina

By Benjamin Hébert and Jesse Schreger

American Economic Review, October 2017

We estimate the causal effect of sovereign default on the equity returns of Argentine firms. We identify this effect by exploiting changes in the probability of Argentine sovereign default induced by legal rulings in the case of NML Capital, Ltd. v. Repub...

Regulating Infrastructure: The Impact on Risk and Investment

By Graeme Guthrie

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2006

The last thirty years have witnessed a fundamental change in the regulation of infrastructure industries. Whereas firms were subject to rate of return regulation and protected from entry in the past, they now face various forms of incentive regulation, ...

Covenants without Courts: Enforcing Residential Segregation with Legally Unenforceable Agreements

By Richard R. W. Brooks

American Economic Review, May 2011

Racial restrictive covenants are private agreements prohibiting sale, rental, use or occupancy of properties by persons of designated races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions. Widely acknowledged for facilitating residential segregation, the Suprem...

The EITC, Tax Refunds, and Unemployment Spells

By Sara LaLumia

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

The earned income tax credit generates large average tax refunds for low-income parents, and these refunds are distributed in a narrow time frame. I rely on this plausibly exogenous source of variation in liquidity to investigate the effect of cash on ...

Report: Committee on Economic Education

By Sam Allgood

American Economic Review, May 2016

Markets in China and Europe on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution

By Carol H. Shiue and Wolfgang Keller

American Economic Review, September 2007

Why did Western Europe industrialize first? An influential view holds that its exceptionally well-functioning markets supported with a certain set of institutions provided the incentives to make investments needed to industrialize. This paper examines t...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

No Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete When Competing against Self

By Coren L. Apicella, Elif E. Demiral, and Johanna Mollerstrom

American Economic Review, May 2017

We report on two experiments investigating whether there is a gender difference in the willingness to compete against oneself (self-competition), similar to what is found when competing against others (other-competition). In one laboratory and one online ...

Exogenous versus Endogenous Separation

By Shigeru Fujita and Garey Ramey

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

This paper assesses how various approaches to modeling the separation margin affect the quantitative ability of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor matching model. The model with a constant separation rate fails to produce realistic volatility and productivit...

Free to Choose? Reform, Choice, and Consideration Sets in the English National Health Service

By Martin Gaynor, Carol Propper, and Stephan Seiler

American Economic Review, November 2016

Choice in public services is controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the effect of removing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model that explicitly captures the removal of the choice constraint...

Expanding "Choice" in School Choice

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Yeon-Koo Che, and Yosuke Yasuda

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance (henceforth DA) mechanism has emerged as a prominent candidate for placing students to public schools. While DA has desirable fairness and incentive properties, it limits the applicants' abilities to communicate their pr...

How Large Are the Effects from Temporary Changes in Family Environment: Evidence from a Child-Evacuation Program during World War II

By Torsten Santavirta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

During World War II, some 50,000 Finnish children were evacuated to Sweden and placed in foster families. The evacuation scheme limited sharply the scope for selection into foster care based on background characteristics. A first-come first-served policy ...

Effectiveness of Employer-Provided Financial Information: Hiring to Retiring

By Robert L. Clark, Melinda Sandler Morrill, and Steven G. Allen

American Economic Review, May 2012

Workers plan and save for retirement throughout their careers. Individuals must navigate complex financial instruments and understand public and employer-provided retirement plan characteristics. Beginning when a worker is first hired, most employers prov...

Persistent Antimarket Culture: A Legacy of the Pale of Settlement after the Holocaust

By Irena Grosfeld, Alexander Rodnyansky, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We estimate long-term effects of Jewish presence in Europe before World War II, using discontinuity at the border of the "Pale of Settlement" area where Jews were allowed to live in the Russian Empire. Current residents of the Pale have lower support for ...

Correlation Misperception in Choice

By Andrew Ellis and Michele Piccione

American Economic Review, April 2017

We present a decision-theoretic analysis of an agent's understanding of the interdependencies in her choices. We provide the foundations for a simple and flexible model that allows the misperception of correlated risks. We introduce a framework in which t...

Factor Proportions and Relative Wages: The Supply-Side Determinants of Wage Inequality

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By Robert H. Topel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Supply-side factors may contribute to rising wage inequality. First, certain changes in the supply of skills allegedly exacerbate wage inequality. Women's increased labor force participation and increased immigration are the leading candidates; both alleg...