The Computational Experiment: An Econometric Tool

[Symposium: Computational Experiments in Macroeconomics]

By Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

An economic experiment places people in an environment desired by the experimenter, who then records the time paths of their economic behavior. Performing experiments using actual people at the level of national economies is obviously impractical but cons...

Collaborating

By Alessandro Bonatti and Johannes Hörner

American Economic Review, April 2011

This paper examines moral hazard in teams over time. Agents are collectively engaged in a project whose duration and outcome are uncertain, and their individual efforts are unobserved. Free-riding leads not only to a reduction in effort, but also to procr...

Envirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for an Emerging Field

By Michael Greenstone and B. Kelsey Jack

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2015

Environmental quality in many developing countries is poor and generates substantial health and productivity costs. However, the few existing measures of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for environmental quality improvements indicate low valuations by ...

The Boundaries of the Firm Revisited

[Symposium: The Firm and its Boundaries]

By Bengt Holmstrom and John Roberts

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Both transaction cost-economics and property-rights theories offer explanations of the boundaries of the firm based on ideas of ex post bargaining and holdup. These theories are quite distinct in their empirical predictions, but neither offers a satisfact...

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

American Economic Review, July 2016

We explore the consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover the following. First, apart from the land mass and water bodies, split and non-split groups are similar across several dimensions. Second, the i...

Entrepreneurial Taxation with Endogenous Entry

By Florian Scheuer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

I analyze the optimal taxation of profits and labor income under endogenous firm formation. Individuals differ in their skill and cost of setting up a firm, and can become workers or entrepreneurs. A tax system in which profits and labor income are sub...

Commodity Taxes under Fiscal Competition: Stackelberg Equilibrium and Optimality

By You-Qiang Wang

American Economic Review, September 1999

The Effects of Recent Immigration on Racial/Ethnic Labor Market Differentials

By Deborah Reed and Sheldon Danziger

American Economic Review, May 2007

Exchange-Rate Hedging: Financial versus Operational Strategies

By George Allayannis, Jane Ihrig, and James P. Weston

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Effect of Market Structure on Cellular Technology Adoption and Pricing

By Katja Seim and V. Brian Viard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

We examine how structural changes in the mobile telecommunications industry between 1996, when local markets were duopolies, and 1998, when varying degrees of regulated entry had occurred, affected firms' product offerings and nonlinear pricing strategie...

The Effects of an Anti-Grade-Inflation Policy at Wellesley College

[Symposium: Academic Production]

By Kristin F. Butcher, Patrick J. McEwan, and Akila Weerapana

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

Average grades in colleges and universities have risen markedly since the 1960s. Critics express concern that grade inflation erodes incentives for students to learn; gives students, employers, and graduate schools poor information on absolute and relativ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The Case of the Missing Currency

By Case M. Sprenkle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

In late 1992, currency in the hands of the public was close to $300 billion, representing nearly 30 percent of M1. One would think that an economic variable of this magnitude would be well-analyzed and well-understood. Quite the contrary. The last serious...

Fiscal Policy Multipliers on Subnational Government Spending

By Jeffrey Clemens and Stephen Miran

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending, with the stringency of a state's rules driving the pace at which it must adjust to shocks. We show that fiscal institutions can generate natural experiments in ...

Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity

By Chang-Tai Hsieh and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, June 2007

The positive correlation between real investment rates and real income levels across countries is driven largely by differences in the price of investment relative to output. The high relative price of investment in poor countries is due to the low pric...

Not Just the Great Contraction: Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960

By Michael D. Bordo and Hugh Rockoff

American Economic Review, May 2013

Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz published A Monetary History of the United States: 1867 to 1960 with Princeton University Press in 1963, to critical acclaim. Since then the book's reputation has grown and it clearly has become one of the most influen...

An Exploration of Technology Diffusion

By Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn

American Economic Review, December 2010

We develop a model that, at the aggregate level, is similar to the one-sector neoclassical growth model; at the disaggregate level, it has implications for the path of observable measures of technology adoption. We estimate it using data on the diffusion ...

Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service: Evidence from India

By Rema Hanna and Shing-Yi Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Students in India who cheat on a simple laboratory task are more likely to prefer public sector jobs. This paper shows that cheating on this task predicts corrupt behavior by civil servants, implying that it is a meaningful predictor of future corruption....

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

Tracing the Impact of Bank Liquidity Shocks: Evidence from an Emerging Market

By Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Atif Mian

American Economic Review, September 2008

We examine the impact of liquidity shocks by exploiting cross-bank liquidity variation induced by unanticipated nuclear tests in Pakistan. We show that for the same firm borrowing from two different banks, its loan from the bank experiencing a 1 percen...