Accounting for the Rise in Consumer Bankruptcies

By Igor Livshits, James MacGee, and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Personal bankruptcies in the United States have increased dramatically, rising from 1.4 per thousand working age adults in 1970 to 8.5 in 2002. We use a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with competitive lenders to evaluate several commonly offered ...

Re-examining Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict

By Edward Miguel and Shanker Satyanath

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Miguel, Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti (2004), henceforth MSS, show that economic growth is negatively related to civil conflict in Africa, using annual rainfall variation as an IV for growth. Antonio Ciccone (2011) argues that thanks to rainfall's mean-r...

Tariff Revenue and Tariff Caps

By Manuel Amador and Kyle Bagwell

American Economic Review, May 2012

We characterize the design of an optimal trade agreement when governments are privately informed about the value of tariff revenue. We show that the problem of designing an optimal trade agreement in this setting can be represented as an optimal delegatio...

Teaching Practices and Social Capital

By Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

In cross-country data, teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are related to various dimensions of social capital. In micro-data from three datasets, teaching practices are also strongly correlated with ...

Modern Medicine and the Twentieth Century Decline in Mortality: Evidence on the Impact of Sulfa Drugs

By Seema Jayachandran, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Kimberly V. Smith

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

This paper studies the contribution of sulfa drugs, a groundbreaking medical innovation in the 1930s, to declines in US mortality. For several infectious diseases, sulfa drugs represented the first effective treatment. Using time-series and difference-...

Intertemporal Price Discrimination: Dynamic Arrivals and Changing Values

By Daniel F. Garrett

American Economic Review, November 2016

We study the profit-maximizing price path of a monopolist selling a durable good to buyers who arrive over time and whose values for the good evolve stochastically. The setting is completely stationary with an infinite horizon. Contrary to the case with c...

Power Dynamics in Organizations

By Jin Li, Niko Matouschek, and Michael Powell

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We examine an infinitely repeated game between a principal, who has the formal authority to decide on a project, and a biased agent, who is privately informed about what projects are available. The optimal relational contract speaks to how power is earned...

What's in a Name? Reputation as a Tradeable Asset

By Steven Tadelis

American Economic Review, June 1999

The author develops a model in which a firm's only asset is its name, which summarizes its reputation, and studies the forces that cause names to be valuable, tradable assets. An adverse selection model in which shifts of ownership are not observable guar...

Anomalies: A Mean-Reverting Walk Down Wall Street

By Werner F. M. De Bondt and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

Stock prices do appear to be somewhat predictable. In particular, if one takes a long-term perspective (3-7 years) or examines individual securities that have experienced extreme price movements, then stock returns display significant negative serial corr...

Technology Growth and Expenditure Growth in Health Care

By Amitabh Chandra and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

In the United States, health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates, yet health care spending relative to GDP has also grown more rapidly than in any other country. We develop a model of patient demand and supplier behavior to explain th...

Loan Syndication and Credit Cycles

By Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein

American Economic Review, May 2010

Social Status in Networks

By Nicole Immorlica, Rachel Kranton, Mihai Manea, and Greg Stoddard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We study social comparisons and status seeking in an interconnected society. Individuals take costly actions that have direct benefits and also confer social status. A new measure of interconnectedness--cohesion--captures the intensity of incentives for s...

Capacity Utilization

By Carol Corrado and Joe Mattey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

This article reviews how the Federal Reserve measures capacity utilization and explains why capacity utilization has been, and likely will remain, a useful indicator of inflationary pressures and business cycle fluctuations. The authors also explain why e...

Growth in a Time of Debt

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, May 2010

Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement among the Poor? Evidence from the Harlem Children's Zone

By Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identi...

Going to College to Avoid the Draft: The Unintended Legacy of the Vietnam War

By David Card and Thomas Lemieux

American Economic Review, May 2001

Procurement Design with Corruption

By Roberto Burguet

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

I investigate the design of optimal procurement mechanisms in the presence of corruption. After contracting with the sponsor, the contractor may bribe the inspector to misrepresent quality. The mechanism affects whether bribery occurs. I discuss the cases...

Is Free Trade Passe?

By Paul R. Krugman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations "I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage" and "I advocate Free Trade." Yet the case for free trade is currently more in doubt than at any time since the 1817 publicat...

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Socioeconomic Status, Poor Health in Childhood, and Human Capital Development

By Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

There are many possible pathways between parental education, income, and health, and between child health and education, but only some of them have been explored in the literature. This essay focuses on links between parental socioeconomic status (as m...

The Accelerated Benefits Demonstration: Impacts on the Employment of Disability Insurance Beneficiaries

By Michelle Stegman Bailey and Robert R. Weathers II

American Economic Review, May 2014

We use data from the Accelerated Benefits demonstration to estimate the impacts of providing newly entitled disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries with health insurance and additional services during the DI program's 24-month Medicare waiting period. Whi...