Women, Wealth, and Mobility

By Lena Edlund and Wojciech Kopczuk

American Economic Review, March 2009

Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the United States peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one-half and then declined to one-third. We argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of d...

Class-Size Caps, Sorting, and the Regression-Discontinuity Design

By Miguel Urquiola and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper examines how schools' choices of class size and households' choices of schools affect regression-discontinuity-based estimates of the effect of class size on student outcomes. We build a model in which schools are subject to a class-size cap...

Taxes and Employment Subsidies in Optimal Redistribution Programs

By Paul Beaudry, Charles Blackorby, and Dezsö Szalay

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper explores how to optimally set taxes and transfers when taxation authorities are uninformed about individuals' value of time in both market and nonmarket activities; and can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. ...

Rare Disasters, Asset Prices, and Welfare Costs

By Robert J. Barro

American Economic Review, March 2009

A representative-consumer model with Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences and i.i.d. shocks, including rare disasters, accords with observed equity premia and risk-free rates if the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 3-4. If the intertemporal elastic...

Cognition and Incomplete Contracts

By Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, March 2009

Thinking about contingencies, designing covenants, and seeing through their implications is costly. Parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete. The paper develops a model of limited cognition and examines its consequences ...

The Value of Groups

By Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap and Daniel John Zizzo

American Economic Review, March 2009

We present the results of an experiment that attempts to measure the social value of groups. In the experiment, group membership is induced artificially: subjects interact with insiders and outsiders in trust games and periodically enter markets where ...

The War on Drugs: Methamphetamine, Public Health, and Crime

By Carlos Dobkin and Nancy Nicosia

American Economic Review, March 2009

In mid-1995, a government effort to reduce the supply of methamphetamine precursors successfully disrupted the methamphetamine market and interrupted a trajectory of increasing usage. The price of methamphetamine tripled and purity declined from 90 per...

Sticky Prices and Monetary Policy: Evidence from Disaggregated US Data

By Jean Boivin, Marc P. Giannoni, and Ilian Mihov

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper shows that the recent evidence that disaggregated prices are volatile does not necessarily challenge the hypothesis of price rigidity used in a large class of macroeconomic models. We document the effect of macroeconomic and sectoral disturb...

Risk, Ambiguity, and the Rank-Dependence Axioms

By Mark J. Machina

American Economic Review, March 2009

Choice problems in the spirit of Ellsberg (1961) suggest that rank-dependent ("Choquet expected utility") preferences over subjective gambles might be subject to the same difficulties that Ellsberg's earlier examples posed for subjective expected utili...

Insurer-Provider Networks in the Medical Care Market

By Katherine Ho

American Economic Review, March 2009

I use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers. I include a simple profit-maximization framework and an additional effect: hospitals that can secur...

Group Identity and Social Preferences

By Yan Chen and Sherry Xin Li

American Economic Review, March 2009

We present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of induced group identity on social preferences. We find that when participants are matched with an ingroup member, they show a 47 percent increase in charity concerns and a 93 percent decrea...

Excise Taxes with Multiproduct Transactions

By Stephen F. Hamilton

American Economic Review, March 2009

I examine excise taxes levied on multiproduct retailers. Excise taxes reduce equilibrium output and decrease equilibrium product variety in the short run, but taxes can raise output per product in the long run and induce entry. Excise taxes are overshifte...

Diversity in the Workplace

By John Morgan and Felix Várdy

American Economic Review, March 2009

We study minority representation in the workplace when employers engage in optimal sequential search and minorities convey noisier signals of ability than mainstream job candidates. The greater signal noise makes it harder for minorities to change employe...

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...

Political Economy at Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations?

By Michael D. Makowsky and Thomas Stratmann

American Economic Review, March 2009

Speeding tickets are determined not only by the speed of the offender, but also by incentives faced by police officers and their vote-maximizing principals. We hypothesize that police officers issue fines more frequently when drivers have a higher opportu...

Democracy and Foreign Education

By Antonio Spilimbergo

American Economic Review, March 2009

Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign-educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a unique panel dataset on foreign students starting in t...

Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially

By Dan Ariely, Anat Bracha, and Stephan Meier

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper experimentally examines image motivation--the desire to be liked and well regarded by others--as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial beh...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2009

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation

By Guido W. Imbens and Jeffrey M. Wooldridge

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

Many empirical questions in economics and other social sciences depend on causal effects of programs or policies. In the last two decades, much research has been done on the econometric and statistical analysis of such causal effects. This recent theore...