Frictionless Technology Diffusion: The Case of Tractors

By Rodolfo E. Manuelli and Ananth Seshadri

American Economic Review, April 2014

Many new technologies display long adoption lags, and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. We study the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960-a well-known...

Economists as Worldly Philosophers

By Robert J. Shiller and Virginia M. Shiller

American Economic Review, May 2011

While leading figures in the early history of economics conceived of it as inseparable from philosophy and other humanities, there has been movement, especially in recent decades, towards its becoming an essentially technical field with narrowly specializ...

Markets: Transparency and the Corporate Bond Market

By Hendrik Bessembinder and William Maxwell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

For decades, corporate bonds primarily traded in an opaque environment. Quotations, which indicate prices at which dealers are willing to transact, were available only to market professionals, most often by telephone. Prices at which bond transactions wer...

Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility

[Symposium: The Top 1 Percent]

By Miles Corak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

My focus is on the degree to which increasing inequality in the high-income countries, particularly in the United States, is likely to limit economic mobility for the next generation of young adults. I discuss the underlying drivers of opportunity that ...

Demographics and Industry Returns

By Stefano DellaVigna and Joshua M. Pollet

American Economic Review, December 2007

How do investors respond to predictable shifts in profitability? We consider how demographic shifts affect profits and returns across industries. Cohort size fluctuations produce forecastable demand changes for age-sensitive sectors, such as toys, bicy...

The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition and Quality of Police

By Justin McCrary

American Economic Review, March 2007

Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments. My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action...

Report of the Secretary

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2015

The Evolution of a Global Climate Change Agreement

By William A. Pizer

American Economic Review, May 2006

Competitive Policy Development

By Alexander V. Hirsch and Kenneth W. Shotts

American Economic Review, April 2015

We present a model of policy development in which competing factions have different ideologies, yet agree on certain common objectives. Policy developers can appeal to a decision maker by making productive investments to improve the quality of their propo...

Retrospectives: John Maynard Keynes, Investment Innovator

By David Chambers and Elroy Dimson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

John Maynard Keynes made a major contribution to the development of professional investment management. Based on detailed archival research at King's College, Cambridge, we describe Keynes' investment philosophy, his investment performance, and the evol...

The Economic Case against Drug Prohibition

By Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This paper discusses the costs and benefits of drug prohibition. It offers a detailed outline of the economic consequences of drug prohibition and a systematic analysis of the relevant empirical evidence. The bottom line is that a relatively free market i...

Attention Discrimination: Theory and Field Experiments with Monitoring Information Acquisition

By Vojtěch Bartoš, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová, and Filip Matějka

American Economic Review, June 2016

We integrate tools to monitor information acquisition in field experiments on discrimination and examine whether gaps arise already when decision makers choose the effort level for reading an application. In both countries we study, negatively stereotyped...

When to Exit a Product: Evidence from the U. S. Motion-Picture Exhibition Market

By Darlene C. Chisholm and George Norman

American Economic Review, May 2006

Do Workers Work More if Wages Are High? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

By Ernst Fehr and Lorenz Goette

American Economic Review, March 2007

Most previous studies on intertemporal labor supply found very small or insignificant substitution effects. It is possible that these results are due to constraints on workers' labor supply choices. We conducted a field experiment in a setting in which ...

The Phillips Curve: Back to the '60s?

By Olivier Blanchard

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper reexamines the behavior of inflation and unemployment and reaches four conclusions: 1) The U.S. Phillips curve is alive and well (at least as well as in the past). 2) Inflation expectations however have become steadily more anchored. 3) The slo...

The Mortgage Mess, the Press, and the Politics of Inattention

By Andrew Caplin and Roy Lowrance

American Economic Review, May 2014

In reviewing the Challenger tragedy, Richard Feynman identified a flawed O-Ring as the proximate cause and NASA's flawed safety culture as a deeper cause. There has been no similar investigation of the mortgage mess, which has been baptized rather than un...

The Economics of Guilds

By Sheilagh Ogilvie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2014

Occupational guilds in medieval and early modern Europe offered an effective institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger slice of the economic pie and redistributing it t...

Examining the Employer-Size Wage Premium in the Manufacturing, Retail Trade, and Service Industries Using Employer-Employee Matched Data

By Kimberly Bayard and Kenneth R. Troske

American Economic Review, May 1999

Agricultural Biotechnology: The Promise and Prospects of Genetically Modified Crops

[Symposium: Agriculture]

By Geoffrey Barrows, Steven Sexton, and David Zilberman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

For millennia, humans have modified plant genes in order to develop crops best suited for food, fiber, feed, and energy production. Conventional plant breeding remains inherently random and slow, constrained by the availability of desirable traits in cl...

Family Health, Children's Own Health, and Test Score Gaps

By Rodney J. Andrews and Trevon D. Logan

American Economic Review, May 2010