Sign Restrictions in Structural Vector Autoregressions: A Critical Review

By Renée Fry and Adrian Pagan

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2011

The paper provides a review of the estimation of structural vector autoregressions with sign restrictions. It is shown how sign restrictions solve the parametric identification problem present in structural systems but leaves the model identification prob...

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments: Reply

By J. Michelle Brock, Andreas Lange, and Erkut Y. Ozbay

American Economic Review, March 2016

In Brock, Lange, and Ozbay (2013), we experimentally investigate social preferences under risk. One of our conclusions is that a social preference model incorporating both ex ante and ex post fairness concerns may best describe behavior. Krawczyk and L...

Subsidizing Vocational Training for Disadvantaged Youth in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Orazio Attanasio, Adriana Kugler, and Costas Meghir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth introduced in Colombia in 2005. This randomized trial offers a unique opportunity to examine the impact of training in a middle income country. We use originally coll...

Promise and Pitfalls in the Use of "Secondary" Data-Sets: Income Inequality in OECD Countries As a Case Study

By Anthony B. Atkinson and Andrea Brandolini

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

This paper examines the role of secondary data-sets in empirical economic research, taking the field of income distribution as a case study. We illustrate problems faced by users of "secondary" statistics, showing how both cross-country comparisons and ti...

Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Thomas Piketty

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

When a lengthy book is widely discussed in academic circles and the popular media, it is probably inevitable that the arguments of the book will be simplified in the telling and retelling. In the case of my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Retrospectives: The Coining of "Privatization" and Germany's National Socialist Party

By Germá Bel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The concept of privatization attracted much attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher's privatization policies were implemented in the United Kingdom. My goal here is not to comment on the merits of privatization as a policy, but r...

The Life-Cycle Profile of Time Spent on Job Search

By Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst, and Loukas Karabarbounis

American Economic Review, May 2013

Using time use survey data we document a hump-shaped profile of job search time in the United States across the life-cycle. The middle-aged unemployed spend roughly three times as much time in job search as the youngest group of unemployed. The hump-shape...

Consumption Responses to Temporary Tax Incentives: Evidence from State Sales Tax Holidays

By Sumit Agarwal, Nathan Marwell, and Leslie McGranahan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

States offer sales tax holidays (STHs) temporarily exempting items like clothes, shoes, and school supplies from the state sales tax. Spending response to these temporary tax changes are investigated using two datasets: the Diary portion of the Consumer E...

Can America Stay on Top?

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of the Economy]

By Paul Krugman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

The United States has long enjoyed a unique position of economic supremacy. By the early 1990s, however, almost everyone believed that the age of U.S. supremacy was nearing its end. Circa 1992 few people would have dared to suggest that a second "American...

Will International Rules on Subsidies Disrupt the World Trading System?

By Kyle Bagwell and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, June 2006

We provide a first formal analysis of the international rules that govern the use of subsidies to domestic production. Our analysis highlights the impact of the new subsidy disciplines that were added to GATT rules with the creation of the WTO. While GATT...

Risk Pooling, Risk Preferences, and Social Networks

By Orazio Attanasio, Abigail Barr, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Garance Genicot, and Costas Meghir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

Using data from an experiment conducted in 70 Colombian communities, we investigate who pools risk with whom when trust is crucial for enforcing risk pooling arrangements. We explore the roles played by risk attitudes and social networks. Both empirically...

The Realization Effect: Risk-Taking after Realized versus Paper Losses

By Alex Imas

American Economic Review, August 2016

Understanding how prior outcomes affect risk attitudes is critical for the study of choice under uncertainty. A large literature documents the significant influence of prior losses on risk attitudes. The findings appear contradictory: some studies find gr...

Female Hires and the Success of Start-Up Firms

By Andrea Weber and Christine Zulehner

American Economic Review, May 2010

Discounting State and Local Pension Liabilities

By Jeffrey R. Brown and David W. Wilcox

American Economic Review, May 2009

Pitfalls of a Minimax Approach to Model Uncertainty

By Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Review, May 2001

Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren

By Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home comput...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

Testing for a Reference Consumer in International Comparisons of Living Standards

By Ian Crawford and J. Peter Neary

American Economic Review, September 2008

Do Individual Retirement Accounts Increase Savings?

By Jane G. Gravelle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

Do IRAs increase savings or are they merely a windfall for otherwise well-off taxpayers? A major objective of universal IRAs was to encourage saving for retirement. A spirited debate has ensued over the use of IRA tax deductions as a means of promoting pr...

Religious Workers' Density and the Racial Earnings Gap

By Fernando Lozano and Jessica Shiwen Cheng

American Economic Review, May 2016

We explore differences between Black and White Non-Hispanic workers in the relationship between childhood exposure to religious workers and a worker's labor market outcomes thirty years later. We identify this relationship by exploiting two sources of var...