Productivity Growth and Capital Flows: The Dynamics of Reforms

By Francisco J. Buera and Yongseok Shin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Why doesn't capital flow into fast-growing countries? Using a model with heterogeneous producers and underdeveloped domestic financial markets, we explain the joint dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and capital flows. When a large-scale economic...

The Impact of Including, Adding, and Subtracting a Tax on Demand

By Naomi E. Feldman and Bradley J. Ruffle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We test the equivalence of tax-inclusive, tax-exclusive and tax-rebate prices through a series of experiments differing only in their handling of the tax. Subjects receive a cash budget and decide how much to keep and how much to spend on various attracti...

Generalizing the Taylor Principle

By Troy Davig and Eric M. Leeper

American Economic Review, June 2007

The paper generalizes the Taylor principle—the proposition that central banks can stabilize the macroeconomy by raising their interest rate instrument more than one-for-one in response to higher inflation—to an environment in which reaction c...

Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: Reply

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, June 2017

Rothstein (2017) successfully replicates Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff's (2014a, b)—henceforth, CFR's—results using data from North Carolina, but raises concerns about CFR's methods. We show that Rothstein's methodological critiques are invali...

Information from Markets Near and Far: Mobile Phones and Agricultural Markets in Niger

By Jenny C. Aker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Price dispersion across markets is common in developing countries. Using novel market and trader-level data, this paper provides estimates of the impact of mobile phones on price dispersion across grain markets in Niger. The introduction of mobile phone ...

Who Thinks about the Competition? Managerial Ability and Strategic Entry in US Local Telephone Markets

By Avi Goldfarb and Mo Xiao

American Economic Review, December 2011

We examine US local telephone markets shortly after the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The data suggest that more experienced, better-educated managers tend to enter markets with fewer competitors. This motivates a structural econometric model based on ...

Do People Mean What They Say? Implications for Subjective Survey Data

By Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2001

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Review of Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences by Carles Boix

By Alberto Alesina

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences argues that geography, technology, and wars determined the formation of a ruling class, inequality, and institutional development, rather than the other way around. Institutio...

Retrospectives: The Phillips Curve: A Rushed Job?

By A. G. Sleeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Half a century ago, Economica published what its webpage claims is "the most heavily cited macroeconomics title of the 20th century"—the paper by A. W. H. "Bill" Phillips (1958) that introduced the Phillips curve. Based on admittedly circum...

The Beveridge Curve: A Survey

By Michael W. L. Elsby, Ryan Michaels, and David Ratner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Important progress has been made in economists' understanding of the Beveridge curve, from its measurement to its expression in canonical labor market models. Yet enduring puzzles remain. Chief among these are the empirical role of vacancies in the recrui...

Indirect Effects of an Aid Program: How Do Cash Transfers Affect Ineligibles' Consumption?

By Manuela Angelucci and Giacomo De Giorgi

American Economic Review, March 2009

Cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages. This effect operates through insurance and credit markets: ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more g...

Inflation Expectations and Readiness to Spend: Cross-Sectional Evidence

By Rüdiger Bachmann, Tim O. Berg, and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

There have been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations to stimulate spending. We examine the relationship between expected inflation and spending attitudes using the microdata from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The i...

Ideology, Economic Policy, and Economic History: Cohen and DeLong's Concrete Economics

By Alexander J. Field

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong view US economic policy extending up to 1980 as pragmatically fostering growth. This they interpret as the Hamiltonian tradition, and their intent is to rescue policy debate from the data- and logic-free quagmire in...

Retrospectives: The Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life

By H. Spencer Banzhaf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2014

This paper traces the history of the "Value of Statistical Life" (VSL), which today is used routinely in benefit-cost analysis of life-saving investments. The "value of statistical life" terminology was introduced by Thomas Schelling (1968) in his essay, ...

Labor Market Heterogeneity and the Aggregate Matching Function

By Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

We estimate an aggregate matching function and find that the regression residual, which captures movements in matching efficiency, displays procyclical fluctuations and a dramatic decline after 2007. Using a matching function framework that explicitly tak...

Progress in Behavioral Game Theory

By Colin F. Camerer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

Behavioral game theory aims to predict how people actually behave by incorporating psychological elements and learning into game theory. With this goal in mind, experimental findings can be organized into three categories: players have systematic 'recipro...

Promoting Healthy Choices: Information versus Convenience

By Jessica Wisdom, Julie S. Downs, and George Loewenstein

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Success in slowing obesity trends would benefit from policies aimed at reducing calorie consumption. In a field experiment at a fast-food sandwich chain, we address the effects of providing calorie information, mimicking recent legislation, and test an...

The Economics of Nationalism

By Xiaohuan Lan and Ben G. Li

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

This paper provides an economic framework for examining how economic openness affects nationalism. Within a country, a region's level of nationalism varies according to its economic interests in its domestic market relative to its foreign market. All else...

The New Life Cycle of Women's Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middles, Expanding Tops

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Goldin and Joshua Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

A new life cycle of women's employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, life-cycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak, and then declined starting in the fifties. The new life cy...