Do Economists Swing for the Fences after Tenure?

By Jonathan Brogaard, Joseph Engelberg, and Edward Van Wesep

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Using a sample of all academics who pass through top 50 economics and finance departments from 1996 through 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure...

Retrospectives: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the "Cruel Dilemma"

By Johannes A. Schwarzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

This paper addresses two conflicting views in the 1950s and 1960s about the inflation-unemployment tradeoff as given by the Phillips curve. Many economists at this time emphasized the issue of a seemingly unavoidable inflationary pressure at or even bel...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Under the Radar: The Effects of Monitoring Firms on Tax Compliance

By Miguel Almunia and David Lopez-Rodriguez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

This paper analyzes the effects of size-dependent tax enforcement on firms' tax compliance. We exploit quasi-experimental variation generated by a Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) in Spain, which monitors firms with more than €6 million in reported revenue. F...

Paternalism against Veblen: Optimal Taxation and Non-respected Preferences for Social Comparisons

By Thomas Aronsson and Olof Johansson-Stenman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

This paper compares optimal nonlinear income tax policies of welfarist and paternalist governments, where the latter does not respect individual preferences regarding relative consumption. Consistent with previous findings, relative consumption concerns t...

The Effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on Opioid Utilization in Medicare

By Thomas C. Buchmueller and Colleen Carey

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

The misuse of prescription opioids has become a serious epidemic in the United States. In response, states have implemented Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs), which record a patient's opioid prescribing history. While few providers participate...

Do Physicians Respond to the Costs and Cost-Sensitivity of Their Patients?

By Mariana Carrera, Dana P. Goldman, Geoffrey Joyce, and Neeraj Sood

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

We use individual level data on purchases of cholesterol-lowering drugs to study the responses of physicians and patients to variation in the cost of drugs. In a sample of first-time statin prescriptions to employees from 12 Fortune 500 firms, we find tha...

The Consequences of Health Care Privatization: Evidence from Medicare Advantage Exits

By Mark Duggan, Jonathan Gruber, and Boris Vabson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

There is considerable controversy over the use of private insurers to deliver public health insurance benefits. We investigate the consequences of patients enrolling in Medicare Advantage (MA), privately managed care organizations that compete with the tr...

Identifying the Harm of Manipulable School-Choice Mechanisms

By Umut Dur, Robert G. Hammond, and Thayer Morrill

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

An important but under-explored issue in student assignment procedures is heterogeneity in the level of strategic sophistication among students. Our work provides the first direct measure of which students rank schools following their true preference orde...

Towards the Greater Good? EU Commissioners' Nationality and Budget Allocation in the European Union

By Kai Gehring and Stephan A. Schneider

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

We demonstrate that the nationalities of EU Commissioners influence budget allocation decisions in favor of their country of origin. Our focus is on the Commissioners for Agriculture, who are exclusively responsible for a specific fund that accounts for t...

Moral Suasion and Economic Incentives: Field Experimental Evidence from Energy Demand

By Koichiro Ito, Takanori Ida, and Makoto Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Firms and governments often use moral suasion and economic incentives to influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for economic activities. To investigate persistence of such interventions, we randomly assign households to moral suasion and dynamic pr...

Do Restrictions on Home Equity Extraction Contribute to Lower Mortgage Defaults? Evidence from a Policy Discontinuity at the Texas Border

By Anil Kumar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Texas is the only US state that limits home equity borrowing to 80 percent of home value. This paper exploits this policy discontinuity around Texas' interstate borders and uses a multidimensional regression discontinuity design framework to find that lim...

Cheating and Incentives: Learning from a Policy Experiment

By César Martinelli, Susan W. Parker, Ana Cristina Pérez-Gea, and Rodimiro Rodrigo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

We use a database generated by a policy intervention that incentivized learning as measured by standardized exams to investigate empirically the relationship between cheating by students and cash incentives to students and teachers. We adapt methods from ...

The Evolution of Physician Practice Styles: Evidence from Cardiologist Migration

By David Molitor

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Physician treatment choices for observably similar patients vary dramatically across regions. This paper exploits cardiologist migration to disentangle the role of physician-specific factors such as preferences and learned behavior versus environment-leve...

The Effect of Export Promotion on Firm-Level Performance

By Jakob Munch and Georg Schaur

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Most countries promote exports. This paper answers two questions: Does export promotion improve firm performance, and do any benefits outweigh costs? We solve self-selection problems by accounting for an extensive set of firm characteristics. In addition,...

Using JEP Articles as Course Readings? Tell Us About It!

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2018

Just Starting Out: Learning and Equilibrium in a New Market

By Ulrich Doraszelski, Gregory Lewis, and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, March 2018

We document the evolution of the new market for frequency response within the UK electricity system over a six-year period. Firms competed in price while facing considerable initial uncertainty about demand and rival behavior. We show that prices stabiliz...

The "Pupil" Factory: Specialization and the Production of Human Capital in Schools

By Roland G. Fryer Jr.

American Economic Review, March 2018

I conducted a randomized field experiment in traditional public elementary schools in Houston, Texas designed to test the potential productivity benefits of teacher specialization. The average impact of encouraging schools to specialize their teachers on ...