Designing Programs for Heterogeneous Populations: The Value of Covariate Information

By Charles F. Manski

American Economic Review, May 2001

Interest Rates, Leverage, and Business Cycles in Emerging Economies: The Role of Financial Frictions

By Andrés Fernández and Adam Gulan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Countercyclical country interest rates have been shown to be an important characteristic of business cycles in emerging markets. In this paper we provide a microfounded rationale for this pattern by linking interest rate spreads to the dynamics of corpora...

Subsidized Farm Input Programs and Agricultural Performance: A Farm-Level Analysis of West Bengal's Green Revolution, 1982-1995

By Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

We examine the role of delivery of subsidized seeds and fertilizers in the form of agricultural minikits by local governments in three successive farm panels in West Bengal spanning 1982-1995. These programs significantly raised farm value added per acre,...

World Oil: Market or Mayhem?

By James L. Smith

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009

Many observers regard the world oil market as a puzzle. Why are oil prices so volatile? Why did prices spike in the summer of 2008, and what role did speculators play? How important is OPEC? Where are oil prices headed in the long run? Is "peak oil" a...

Capital Taxation in the Twenty-First Century

By Alan J. Auerbach and Kevin Hassett

American Economic Review, May 2015

In his influential book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues forcefully that rising wealth and wealth inequality is an inherent characteristic of capitalist economies and calls for strong policy responses, in particular a s...

Perceiving Prospects Properly

By Jakub Steiner and Colin Stewart

American Economic Review, July 2016

When an agent chooses between prospects, noise in information processing generates an effect akin to the winner's curse. Statistically unbiased perception systematically overvalues the chosen action because it fails to account for the possibility that noi...

An Ascending Auction for Interdependent Values: Uniqueness and Robustness to Strategic Uncertainty

By Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, May 2007

General Equilibrium Impacts of a Federal Clean Energy Standard

By Lawrence H. Goulder, Marc A. C. Hafstead, and Roberton C. Williams III

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

Economists have tended to view emissions pricing (e.g., cap and trade or a carbon tax) as the most cost-effective approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper offers a different view. Employing analytical and numerically solved general equ...

The Venture Capital Revolution

[Symposium: Changes in Corporate Structure]

By Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

Venture capital has emerged as an important intermediary in financial markets, providing capital to young high-technology firms that might have otherwise gone unfunded. Venture capitalists have developed a variety of mechanisms to overcome the problems th...

Communicating Uncertainty in Official Economic Statistics: An Appraisal Fifty Years after Morgenstern

By Charles F. Manski

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error free or ...

Clicking on Heaven's Door: The Effect of Immigrant Legalization on Crime

By Paolo Pinotti

American Economic Review, January 2017

We estimate the effect of immigrant legalization on the crime rate of immigrants in Italy by exploiting an ideal regression discontinuity design: fixed quotas of residence permits are available each year, applications must be submitted electronically on s...

Coping with Political Instability: Micro Evidence from Kenya's 2007 Election Crisis

By Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2010

Risky Transportation Choices and the Value of a Statistical Life

By Gianmarco León and Edward Miguel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to generate some of the first revealed preference value of a statistical life (VSL) estimates from a low-income setting. We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality ris...

Substitution and Stigma: Evidence on Religious Markets from the Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal

By Daniel M. Hungerman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

This paper considers substitution between charitable activities in the context of religious practice by examining the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal's impact on both Catholic and non-Catholic religiosity. I find a fall in the Catholic population compen...

Comment on the Modigliani-Miller Propositions

By Stephen A. Ross

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

[This is a comment on "The Modigliani-Miller Propositions after Thirty Years" by Merton H. Miller in this same issue.] What a treat it is to have the opportunity to read Merton Miller's ruminations on the MM Propositions. A comment on Miller and Modiglian...

How Do Voters Respond to Information? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign

By Chad Kendall, Tommaso Nannicini, and Francesco Trebbi

American Economic Review, January 2015

In a large-scale controlled trial in collaboration with the reelection campaign of an Italian incumbent mayor, we administered (randomized) messages about the candidate's valence or ideology. Informational treatments affected both actual votes in the prec...

The Simple Economics of Commodity Price Speculation

By Christopher R. Knittel and Robert S. Pindyck

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2016

The price of crude oil never exceeded $40 per barrel until mid-2004. By July 2008 it peaked at $145 and by late 2008 it fell to $30 before increasing to $110 in 2011. Are speculators partly to blame for these price changes? Using a simple model of supply ...

Robust Social Decisions

By Eric Danan, Thibault Gajdos, Brian Hill, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Review, September 2016

We propose and operationalize normative principles to guide social decisions when individuals potentially have imprecise and heterogeneous beliefs, in addition to conflicting tastes or interests. To do so, we adapt the standard Pareto principle to those p...

Exploitative Innovation

By Paul Heidhues, Botond Kőszegi, and Takeshi Murooka

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

We analyze innovation incentives when firms can invest either in increasing the product's value (value-increasing innovation) or in increasing the hidden prices they collect from naive consumers (exploitative innovation). We show that if firms cannot retu...

Innovation and Institutional Ownership

By Philippe Aghion, John Van Reenen, and Luigi Zingales

American Economic Review, February 2013

We find that greater institutional ownership is associated with more innovation. To explore the mechanism, we contrast the "lazy manager" hypothesis with a model where institutional owners increase innovation incentives through reducing career risks. T...