Corporate Takeovers: The Efficiency Arguments

[Symposium: Takeovers]

By F. M. Scherer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

In recent years, the tender offer takeover has been praised and damned with a ferocity suggesting that the survival of capitalism is at stake. The truth, as in most disputes with substantial metaphysical content, is more prosaic. Some takeovers enhance ec...

On Economics: A Review of Why Nations Fail by D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson and Pillars of Prosperity by T. Besley and T. Persson

By W. Bentley MacLeod

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

The purpose of this essay is to review the books Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and Pillars of Prosperity by Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson. The essay briefly discusses the main contributions of the books and ...

Caste as an Impediment to Trade

By Siwan Anderson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We compare outcomes across two types of villages in rural India. Villages vary by which caste is dominant (owns the majority of land): either a low or high caste. The key finding is that income is substantially higher for low-caste households residing in ...

Should Monetary Policy Respond Strongly to Output Gaps?

By Bennett T. McCallum

American Economic Review, May 2001

Culture and Institutions

By Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2015

A growing body of empirical work measuring different types of cultural traits has shown that culture matters for a variety of economic outcomes. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of the relevance of culture: its relationship to institutions. We re...

Valuing the Wind: Renewable Energy Policies and Air Pollution Avoided

By Kevin Novan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

Exploiting variation in the hourly production from wind turbines, this paper quantifies the heterogeneity in the marginal impact of renewable electricity on pollution. The results reveal that output from competing renewable capacity additions—e.g., ...

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009

The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. This decline i...

Value Maximization and the Acquisition Process

[Symposium: Takeovers]

By Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

Like the rest of us, corporate managers have many personal goals and ambitions, only one of which is to get rich. The way they try to run their companies reflects these personal goals. Shareholders, in contrast, deprived of the pleasures of running the co...

Evaluating Counterterrorism Spending

By John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

In this article, we present a simple back-of-the-envelope approach for evaluating whether counterterrorism security measures reduce risk sufficiently to justify their costs. The approach uses only four variables: the consequences of a successful attack, t...

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...