A Flat World, a Level Playing Field, a Small World After All, or None of the Above? A Review of Thomas L Friedman's The World is Flat

By Edward E. Leamer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2007

Geography, flat or not, creates special relationships between buyers and sellers who reside in the same neighborhoods, but Friedman turns this metaphor inside-out by using The World is Flat to warn us of the perils of a relationship-free world in w...

Reducing Crime and Violence: Experimental Evidence from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Liberia

By Christopher Blattman, Julian C. Jamison, and Margaret Sheridan

American Economic Review, April 2017

We show that a number of noncognitive skills and preferences, including patience and identity, are malleable in adults, and that investments in them reduce crime and violence. We recruited criminally engaged men and randomized one-half to eight weeks of c...

Public Debt Overhangs: Advanced-Economy Episodes since 1800

[Symposium: Government Debt]

By Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, and Kenneth S. Rogoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

We identify the major public debt overhang episodes in the advanced economies since the early 1800s, characterized by public debt to GDP levels exceeding 90 percent for at least five years. Consistent with Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) and most of the more ...

Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States: Comment

By Gary E. Bolton and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, March 2010

In a series of binary choice problems, we investigate how a chooser's risk taking changes when others share in their personal risk, either equally or unequally. We find that when the safe option yields inequality, the risky option is taken significantly m...

Does Price Matter in Charitable Giving? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment

By Dean Karlan and John A. List

American Economic Review, December 2007

We conducted a natural field experiment to further our understanding of the economics of charity. Using direct mail solicitations to over 50,000 prior donors of a nonprofit organization, we tested the effectiveness of a matching grant on charitable giv...

State Capacity and American Technology: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century

By Daron Acemoglu, Jacob Moscona, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2016

Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth compellingly shows how technical innovation, stimulated by the country's institutions, has radically improved the living standards of the citizens of the US. We conduct an empirical in...

A Comment on the Economics of Labor Adjustment: Mind the Gap: Evidence from a Monte Carlo Experiment

By Christian Bayer

American Economic Review, December 2009

This comment addresses a point raised in Russell Cooper and Jonathan Willis (2003, 2004), which discusses whether the "gap approach" is appropriate to describe the adjustment of production factors. They show that this approach to labor adjustment as appli...

Household Debt and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

By Dean M. Maki

American Economic Review, March 2001

Behavioral Economics: Past, Present, and Future

By Richard H. Thaler

American Economic Review, July 2016

Credit and Banking Structure: Asian and African-American Experience in Los Angeles

By Gary Dymski and Lisa Mohanty

American Economic Review, May 1999

Services Trade and Policy

By Joseph Francois and Bernard Hoekman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

A substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services since the mid-1980s. Much of this is inspired by the WTO and regional trade agreements. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberali...

Understanding Price Controls and Nonprice Competition with Matching Theory

By John William Hatfield, Charles R. Plott, and Tomomi Tanaka

American Economic Review, May 2012

We develop a quality competition model to understand how price controls affect market outcomes in buyer-seller markets with discrete goods of varying quality. While competitive equilibria do not necessarily exist in such markets when price controls are im...

Making Private Data Accessible in an Opaque Industry: The Experience of the Private Capital Research Institute

By Leslie Jeng and Josh Lerner

American Economic Review, May 2016

Private markets are becoming an increasingly important way of financing rapidly growing and mature firms, and private investors are reputed to have far-reaching economic impacts. These important markets, however, are uniquely difficult to study. This pape...

Credit Supply and the Price of Housing

By Giovanni Favara and Jean Imbs

American Economic Review, March 2015

An exogenous expansion in mortgage credit has significant effects on house prices. This finding is established using US branching deregulations between 1994 and 2005 as instruments for credit. Credit increases for deregulated banks, but not in placebo sam...

Markets and Morality

By Jagdish Bhagwati

American Economic Review, May 2011

The paper addresses two issues. First, economics has evolved both as a positive science and, from moral philosophy, also as a normative discipline. Advancing the public good requires that public policy walk on both these legs. Second, the criticism has be...

Social Support Substitution and the Earnings Rebound: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity in Disability Insurance Reform

By Lex Borghans, Anne C. Gielen, and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

We exploit a cohort discontinuity in the stringency of Dutch disability reforms to estimate the effects of decreased DI (disability insurance) generosity on behavior of existing recipients. We find evidence of social support substitution: individuals o...

School Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools

By David Card, Martin D. Dooley, and A. Abigail Payne

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

We study competition between two publicly funded school systems in Ontario, Canada: one that is open to all students, and one that is restricted to children of Catholic backgrounds. A simple model of competition between the competing systems predicts grea...

From Micro to Macro via Production Networks

[Symposium: Social Networks]

By Vasco M. Carvalho

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2014

A modern economy is an intricately linked web of specialized production units, each relying on the flow of inputs from their suppliers to produce their own output which, in turn, is routed towards other downstream units. In this essay, I argue that this n...

Financial Innovation, Collateral, and Investment

By Ana Fostel and John Geanakoplos

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2016

Financial innovations that change how promises are collateralized affect prices and investment, even in the absence of any change in fundamentals. In C-models, the ability to leverage an asset always generates overinvestment compared to Arrow-Debreu. Cred...

In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850-1940

By Claudia Olivetti and M. Daniele Paserman

American Economic Review, August 2015

This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by...