Debt Portfolios and Homestead Exemptions

By Thomas Hintermaier and Winfried Koeniger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2016

This paper investigates the economic relevance of the large differences in homestead exemptions across US states. We build a structural model for an equilibrium analysis of debt-portfolio choices over the life cycle. Our analysis captures key patterns fro...

Simultaneous Search and Efficiency of Entry and Search Intensity

By Pieter A. Gautier and Christian L. Holzner

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2017

We consider a model where firms open vacancies and post and commit to a wage mechanism. Search is costly and workers simultaneously apply to multiple jobs. Firms can be connected to multiple workers and workers to multiple firms. We use a new method to de...

The Impact of Women's Health Clinic Closures on Preventive Care

By Yao Lu and David J. G. Slusky

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

We examine the impact of women's health clinic closures on women's preventive care use in Texas and Wisconsin using a unique policy context, data on clinic street addresses, and confidential respondent ZIP codes from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillanc...

How Progressive is the U.S. Federal Tax System? A Historical and International Perspective

[Symposium: U.S. Tax Policy in International Perspective]

By Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

This paper provides estimates of federal tax rates by income groups in the United States since 1960, with special emphasis on very top income groups. We include individual and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate and gift taxes. The progressi...

Optimal Life Cycle Unemployment Insurance

By Claudio Michelacci and Hernán Ruffo

American Economic Review, February 2015

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return...

Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?

By Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

In this paper we investigate whether exposure to the self-interest model commonly used in economics alters the extent to which people behave in self-interested ways. First, we report the results of several empirical studies—some our own, some by oth...

Addressing Global Environmental Externalities: Transaction Costs Considerations

By Gary D. Libecap

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

Is there a way to understand why some global environmental externalities are addressed effectively, whereas others are not? The transaction costs of defining the property rights to mitigation benefits and costs is a useful framework for such analysis. Thi...

Fertility Decline in the Developed World: Where Will It End?

By John Bongaarts

American Economic Review, May 1999

Nonlinear Pricing of Storable Goods

By Igal Hendel, Alessandro Lizzeri, and Nikita Roketskiy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2014

This paper develops a model of nonlinear pricing of storable goods. We show that storability imposes novel constraints on a monopolist's ability to extract surplus. We then show that the attempt to relax these constraints can generate cyclical patterns in...

The Price Effects of a Large Merger of Manufacturers: A Case Study of Maytag-Whirlpool

By Orley C. Ashenfelter, Daniel S. Hosken, and Matthew C. Weinberg

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

Many experts speculate that US antitrust policy towards horizontal mergers has been too lenient. We estimate the price effects of Whirlpool's acquisition of Maytag to provide new evidence on this debate. We compare price changes in appliance markets mo...

The Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Behavioral Interventions: Experimental Evidence from Energy Conservation

By Hunt Allcott and Todd Rogers

American Economic Review, October 2014

We document three remarkable features of the Opower program, in which social comparison-based home energy reports are repeatedly mailed to more than six million households nationwide. First, initial reports cause high-frequency "action and backsliding,...

Faculty without Students: Resource Allocation in Higher Education

By William R. Johnson and Sarah Turner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Colleges and universities display substantial differences in the ratio of students to faculty across fields or disciplines. At Harvard University, for example, economics has about 16 students majoring in the subject per full-time-teaching equivalent, whil...

Marrying Up: The Role of Sex Ratio in Assortative Matching

By Ran Abramitzky, Adeline Delavande, and Luis Vasconcelos

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

We assemble a novel dataset to study the impact of male scarcity on marital assortative matching and other marriage market outcomes using the large shock that WWI caused to the number of French men. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that...

Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Trade-Off

By Peter Arcidiacono and Michael Lovenheim

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

This paper reviews the literature on affirmative action in undergraduate education and law schools, focusing especially on the trade-off between institutional quality and the fit between a school and a student. We discuss the conditions under which affirm...

Central-Bank Independence, Economic Behavior, and Optimal Term Lengths: Comment

By Xiang Lin

American Economic Review, September 1999

Internal Migration in the United States

By Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, and Abigail Wozniak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

This paper examines the history of internal migration in the United States since the 1980s. By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low. The widespread decline in migration rates across a large number of subpopulations su...

Confucianism and the East Asian Miracle

By Ming-Yih Liang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

We examine two behavioral traits essential to Confucianism, and put forward hypotheses as to whether these behavioral traits impede or are conducive to "leading" or "follower" mode growth. A dynamic leader-follower general equilibrium model with appropria...

Are Women's Wage Gains Men's Losses? A Distributional Test

By Nicole M. Fortin and Thomas Lemieux

American Economic Review, May 2000

Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India

By Abhijit V. Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Stuti Khemani

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their quality. We conducted a randomized evaluation of three interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation to India: providing info...

The Potential of Social Identity for Equilibrium Selection

By Roy Chen and Yan Chen

American Economic Review, October 2011

When does a common group identity improve efficiency in coordination games? To answer this question, we propose a group-contingent social preference model and derive conditions under which social identity changes equilibrium selection. We test our predict...