Review of The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

By Stanley L. Engerman

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

The two books being reviewed are concerned with the importance of slavery in the antebellum US South for the economic development of the Northern states. One (Schermerhorn) deals primarily with Southern financial arrangements facilitating the sales of sla...

Career and Marriage in the Age of the Pill

By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, May 2000

Comments on Economic Models, Economics, and Economists: Remarks on Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik

By Ariel Rubinstein

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

This essay reviews Dani Rodrik's superb book Economics Rules and argues that it can serve as an ideal platform for discussing what economists can and should accomplish. The essay comments on some of the major issues in contemporary economics examin...

HIV Risk and Adolescent Behaviors in Africa

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2013

We investigate the relationship between HIV, marriage and nonmarital sexual activity, with a focus on adolescent behaviors. We use data from 45 Demographic and Health Surveys to examine how adolescent behavior among women born from 1958 to 1965 are relate...

Political Influence and the Dynamic Consistency of Policy

By Michelle R. Garfinkel and Jaewoo Lee

American Economic Review, June 2000

Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India

By Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, and Sandip Sukhtankar

American Economic Review, October 2016

Antipoverty programs in developing countries are often difficult to implement; in particular, many governments lack the capacity to deliver payments securely to targeted beneficiaries. We evaluate the impact of biometrically authenticated payments infrast...

A Century of Growth and Improvement

By Benjamin M. Friedman

American Economic Review, May 2016

The fact that actual economic advance over time normally means producing and consuming different things is usually left implicit in modern models of economic growth. By contrast, qualitative change--new goods and services, and better versions of what alre...

School Choice, School Quality, and Postsecondary Attainment

By David J. Deming, Justine S. Hastings, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger

American Economic Review, March 2014

We study the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion. We find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school. ...

The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Reply

By Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway

American Economic Review, March 2000

The Psychological Lives of the Poor

By Frank Schilbach, Heather Schofield, and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2016

All individuals rely on a fundamental set of mental capacities and functions, or bandwidth, in their economic and non-economic lives. Yet, many factors associated with poverty, such as malnutrition, alcohol consumption, or sleep deprivation, may tax this ...

The Effect of Globalization on the Performance of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the United States: Does Owners' Race/Ethnicity Matter?

By Elizabeth Asiedu and James A. Freeman

American Economic Review, May 2007

Monetary Aggregates and Output

By Scott Freeman and Finn E. Kydland

American Economic Review, December 2000

We ask whether the following observations may result from endogenously determined fluctuations in the money multiplier rather than a causal influence of money on output: (i) M1 is positively correlated with real output; (ii) the money multiplier and depos...

Explaining African Economic Performance

By Paul Collier and Jan Willem Gunning

Journal of Economic Literature, March 1999

Africa has had slow growth and a massive exodus of capital. In many respects it has been the most capital-hostile region. We review and interpret the aggregate-level and microeconomic literatures to identify the key explanations for this performance. Ther...

Internal Geography, International Trade, and Regional Specialization

By A. Kerem Coşar and Pablo D. Fajgelbaum

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

We introduce an internal geography to the canonical model of international trade driven by comparative advantages to study the regional effects of external economic integration. The model features a dual-economy structure, in which locations near internat...

A Macroprudential Approach to Financial Regulation

[Symposium: Financial Regulation after the Crisis]

By Samuel G. Hanson, Anil K. Kashyap, and Jeremy C. Stein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Many observers have argued that the regulatory framework in place prior to the global financial crisis was deficient because it was largely "microprudential" in nature. A microprudential approach is one in which regulation is partial equilibrium in its co...

The Good Samaritan and Traffic on the Road to Jericho

By Ted Bergstrom

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

This paper studies a version of the Volunteer's Dilemma in which players sequentially observe someone in trouble and decide whether to help. Where preferences are identical, we show that if the frequency with which potential helpers appear is above some t...

Virtual Classrooms: How Online College Courses Affect Student Success

By Eric P. Bettinger, Lindsay Fox, Susanna Loeb, and Eric S. Taylor

American Economic Review, September 2017

Online college courses are a rapidly expanding feature of higher education, yet little research identifies their effects relative to traditional in-person classes. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that taking a course online, instead of i...

Consume Now or Later? Time Inconsistency, Collective Choice, and Revealed Preference

By Abi Adams, Laurens Cherchye, Bram De Rock, and Ewout Verriest

American Economic Review, December 2014

We develop a revealed preference methodology that allows us to explore whether time inconsistencies in household choice are the product of individual preference nonstationarities or the result of individual heterogeneity and renegotiation within the ho...

Consumer Spending and the Economic Stimulus Payments of 2008

By Jonathan A. Parker, Nicholas S. Souleles, David S. Johnson, and Robert McClelland

American Economic Review, October 2013

We measure the change in household spending caused by receipt of the economic stimulus payments of 2008, using questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation from the randomized timing of disbursement. Households spent 12-30 percent (dep...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2009