Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field

By Stefano DellaVigna

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

The research in Psychology and Economics (a.k.a. Behavioral Economics) suggests that individuals deviate from the standard model in three respects: (1) nonstandard preferences, (2) nonstandard beliefs, and (3) nonstandard decision making. In this paper,...

Can the West Save Africa?

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort toward Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts ...

Gender Differences in Preferences

By Rachel Croson and Uri Gneezy

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

This paper reviews the literature on gender differences in economic experiments. In the three main sections, we identify robust differences in risk preferences, social (other-regarding) preferences, and competitive preferences. We also speculate on the ...

A Review of Michael Tomz's Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries

By Mark Gersovitz

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

Repudiation and expropriation pose obstacles to the international mobility of capital and thereby to efficient international allocation of resources. Tomz discusses the determinants of lending in the face of the threat of repudiation. Using history, he ...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

Are Women More Credit Constrained? Experimental Evidence on Gender and Microenterprise Returns

By Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

We report on a field experiment providing random grants to microenterprise owners. The grants generated large profit increases for male owners but not for female owners. We show that the gender gap does not simply mask differences in ability, risk aver...

The Effect of Grade Retention on High School Completion

By Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. In this paper, we use plausibly exogenous variation in retention ge...

Legal Reform and Loan Repayment: The Microeconomic Impact of Debt Recovery Tribunals in India

By Sujata Visaria

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

In 1993, the Indian government introduced debt recovery tribunals to speed up the resolution of debt recovery claims larger than a threshold. This paper exploits the staggered introduction of tribunals across states and the link between overdues and cl...

The Smuggling of Art, and the Art of Smuggling: Uncovering the Illicit Trade in Cultural Property and Antiques

By Raymond Fisman and Shang-Jin Wei

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

We empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. We generate a measure of illicit trafficking in these goods by comparing imports re...

To Work or Not to Work? Child Development and Maternal Labor Supply

By Paul Frijters, David W. Johnston, Manisha Shah, and Michael A. Shields

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

We estimate the effect of early child development on maternal labor force participation. Mothers of poorly developing children may remain at home to care for their children. Alternatively, mothers may enter the labor force to pay for additional educati...

Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start

By David Deming

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

This paper provides new evidence on the long-term benefits of Head Start using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I compare siblings who differ in their participation in the program, controlling for a variety of pre-treatment covariates. I esti...

Task Specialization, Immigration, and Wages

By Giovanni Peri and Chad Sparber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

Large inflows of less educated immigrants may reduce wages paid to comparably-educated, native-born workers. However, if less educated foreign- and native-born workers specialize in different production tasks, because of different abilities, immigratio...

HIV/AIDS and Fertility

By Jane G. Fortson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

This paper studies the response of fertility to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. I use repeated cross sections of the Demographic and Health Surveys for 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to examine this question empirically. Using individu...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

Optimal Monetary Policy Rules in an Estimated Sticky-Information Model

By Ricardo Reis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

This paper uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky information as a laboratory to study monetary policy. It characterizes the model's predictions for macro dynamics and optimal policy at prior parameters, and then uses da...

Can a Representative-Agent Model Represent a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy

By Sungbae An, Yongsung Chang, and Sun-Bin Kim

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors. In order to reconcile theory with da...