The Effect of Labor Migration on the Diffusion of Democracy: Evidence from a Former Soviet Republic

By Toman Barsbai, Hillel Rapoport, Andreas Steinmayr, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration wave that started in the aftermath of the Russian crisis of 1998 strongly affected electoral outco...

Growth, Pollution, and Life Expectancy: China from 1991-2012

By Avraham Ebenstein, Maoyong Fan, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Peng Yin, and Maigeng Zhou

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper examines the relationship between income, pollution, and mortality in China from 1991-2012. Using first-difference models, we document a robust positive association between city-level GDP and life expectancy. We also find a negative association...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

The Convergence in Black-White Infant Mortality Rates during the 1960's

By Kenneth Y. Chay and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Review, May 2000

Immigration and Globalization: A Review Essay

By George J. Borjas

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2015

This essay revisits the argument that the removal of worldwide immigration restrictions would induce a very large increase in world GDP. The recent books Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World by Paul Collier and The Price of Rights: Reg...

Bankruptcy Rates among NFL Players with Short-Lived Income Spikes

By Kyle Carlson, Joshua Kim, Annamaria Lusardi, and Colin F. Camerer

American Economic Review, May 2015

We test for consumption smoothing using bankruptcy data on players in the National Football League (NFL), who typically earn several million dollars during an income spike that lasts a few years. The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that players should save...

Credibility of Optimal Monetary Delegation: Comment

By John Driffill and Zeno Rotondi

American Economic Review, September 2006

Exchange Rate Regimes in the Modern Era: Fixed, Floating, and Flaky

By Andrew K. Rose

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

This paper provides a selective survey of the incidence, causes, and consequences of a country's choice of its exchange rate regime. I begin with a critical review of Michael Klein and Jay C. Shambaugh's (2010) book Exchange Rate Regimes in the Modern Era...

Retirement Contribution Rate Nudges and Plan Participation: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Jacob Goldin, Tatiana Homonoff, and Will Tucker-Ray

American Economic Review, May 2017

Simple interventions like changing the default or sending a short message can induce individuals to save more for retirement. However, messages that emphasize high savings rates may increase the amount that savings plan participants save while reducing th...

Social Norms and Economic Theory

[Symposium: Social Norms]

By Jon Elster

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

One of the most persistent cleavages in the social sciences is the opposition between two lines of thought conveniently associated with Adam Smith and Emile Durkheim, between homo economicus and homo sociologicus. Of these, the former is supposed to be gu...

How Important Is Technology Capital for the United States?

By Marek Kapička

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

I construct measures of technology capital and country openness for the US economy and the rest of the world for 1982-2007. The key identifying assumption is that firms equalize returns on tangible and technology capital. For the US economy, technology ca...

Identifying and Spurring High-Growth Entrepreneurship: Experimental Evidence from a Business Plan Competition

By David McKenzie

American Economic Review, August 2017

Almost all firms in developing countries have fewer than ten workers, with a modal size of one. Are there potential high-growth entrepreneurs, and can public policy help identify them and facilitate their growth? A large-scale national business plan compe...

Does State Fiscal Relief during Recessions Increase Employment? Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Laura Feiveson, Zachary Liscow, and William Gui Woolston

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 included $88 billion of aid to state governments administered through the Medicaid reimbursement process. We examine the effect of these transfers on states' employment. Because state fiscal relief...

American Farms Keep Growing: Size, Productivity, and Policy

[Symposium: Agriculture]

By Daniel A. Sumner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

Commercial agriculture in the United States is comprised of several hundred thousand farms, and these farms continue to become larger and fewer. The size of commercial farms is sometimes best-measured by sales, in other cases by acreage, and in still ot...

Financial Intermediation, Leverage, and Macroeconomic Instability

By Gregory Phelan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2016

This paper investigates how financial sector leverage affects macroeconomic instability and welfare. In the model, banks borrow (use leverage) to allocate resources to productive projects and provide liquidity. When banks do not actively issue new equity,...

Interview with Robert A. Mundell

By Howard R. Vane and Chris Mulhearn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Robert A. Mundell has been Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York City, New York, since 1974 and University Professor since 2001. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science "for his analysis of monetary and fis...

Human Capital and Imperfectly Informed Financial Markets

By Isaac Ehrlich and Jong Kook Shin

American Economic Review, May 2010

Information Avoidance

By Russell Golman, David Hagmann, and George Loewenstein

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

We commonly think of information as a means to an end. However, a growing theoretical and experimental literature suggests that information may directly enter the agent's utility function. This can create an incentive to avoid information, even when it is...

Natural "Natural Experiments" in Economics

By Mark R. Rosenzweig and Kenneth I. Wolpin

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2000

The recent literature exploiting natural events as "natural experiment" instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, marke...

Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: San Francisco, CA, January 2, 2016

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2016