Africa's Economic Performance: Limitations of the Current Consensus

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By John Sender

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Historical and micro-survey evidence, as well as the standard data from international organizations, support less pessimistic conclusions on Africa's development performance than those reached by many social scientists. The changes that have benefited wom...

Promoting Undergraduate Research in Economics

By Gail M. Hoyt and KimMarie McGoldrick

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper provides a snapshot of undergraduate research at top 30 liberal arts institutions and top 30 national universities (based on U.S. News and World Report rankings, 2017). This description provides a broader perspective than exists in the literatu...

The Effect of Mergers in Search Markets: Evidence from the Canadian Mortgage Industry

By Jason Allen, Robert Clark, and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Review, October 2014

We examine the relationship between concentration and price dispersion using variation induced by a merger in the Canadian mortgage market. Since interest rates are determined through a search and negotiation process, consolidation weakens consumers' barg...

Low Skilled Immigration and Work-Fertility Tradeoffs among High Skilled US Natives

By Delia Furtado and Heinrich Hock

American Economic Review, May 2010

Market Externalities of Large Unemployment Insurance Extension Programs

By Rafael Lalive, Camille Landais, and Josef Zweimüller

American Economic Review, December 2015

We provide evidence that unemployment insurance affects equilibrium conditions in the labor market, which creates significant "market externalities." We provide a framework for identification of such equilibrium effects and implement it using the Regional...

What Do a Million Observations on Banks Say about the Transmission of Monetary Policy?

By Anil K. Kashyap and Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Review, June 2000

We study the monetary-transmission mechanism with a data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured U.S. commercial bank from 1976 to 1993. We find that the impact of monetary policy on lending is stronger for banks with less liquid balance...

Approximation in Mechanism Design

By Jason D. Hartline

American Economic Review, May 2012

This paper considers three challenge areas for mechanism design and describes the role approximation plays in resolving them. Challenge 1: optimal mechanisms are finely tuned to precise details of the distribution on agent preferences. Challenge 2: in en...

The Effect of Criminal Records on Access to Employment

By Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper adds to the empirical evidence that criminal records are a barrier to employment. Using data from 2,655 online applications sent on behalf of fictitious male applicants, we show that employers are 60 percent more likely to call applicants that ...

Work and Welfare: Lessons on Employment Programs

[Symposium: Welfare and Workfare]

By Judith M. Gueron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

The nation's social welfare policy reflects an ongoing effort to balance sometimes competing objectives—alleviating poverty and promoting self-sufficiency—in a manner consistent with underlying public values about the primacy of the family and...

Do Job-to-Job Transitions Drive Wage Fluctuations over the Business Cycle?

By Fatih Karahan, Ryan Michaels, Benjamin Pugsley, Ayşegül Şahin, and Rachel Schuh

American Economic Review, May 2017

We investigate the importance of job-to-job (JJ) transitions for cyclical wage dynamics. By exploiting cross-state variation, we find that wage growth is tightly linked to variation in the JJ transition probability, and conditional on this, the job findin...

The Labor Market Impacts of Forced Migration

By Isabel Ruiz and Carlos Vargas-Silva

American Economic Review, May 2015

During the 1990s the Kagera region of Tanzania experienced a forced migration shock. A series of geographical barriers led to a higher concentration of forced migrants in some parts of the region relative to others, resulting in a natural experiment. Usin...

Variable Rare Disasters: A Tractable Theory of Ten Puzzles in Macro-finance

By Xavier Gabaix

American Economic Review, May 2008

Signaling Character in Electoral Competition

By Navin Kartik and R. Preston McAfee

American Economic Review, June 2007

We study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have "character" and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. Character is desira...

What Can We Learn from the Grand Policy Experiment? Lessons from SO2 Allowance Trading

[Symposium: SO2 Trading]

By Robert N. Stavins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

The most ambitious application ever attempted of a market-based approach to environmental protection has been for the control of acid rain under the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which established a sulfur dioxide allowance trading program. This essay...

Wages and Informality in Developing Countries

By Costas Meghir, Renata Narita, and Jean-Marc Robin

American Economic Review, April 2015

We develop an equilibrium wage-posting model with heterogeneous firms that decide to locate in the formal or the informal sector and workers who search randomly on and off the job. We estimate the model on Brazilian labor force survey data. In equilibr...

Understanding PPPs and PPP-Based National Accounts: Comment

By Erwin Diewert

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

The Causal Effect of Parents' Schooling on Children's Schooling: A Comparison of Estimation Methods

By Helena Holmlund, Mikael Lindahl, and Erik Plug

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

We review the empirical literature that estimates the causal effect of parent's schooling on child's schooling, and conclude that estimates differ across studies. We then consider three explanations for why this is: (a) idiosyncratic differences in data s...

Improving College Access and Success for Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Large Need-Based Grant Program

By Gabrielle Fack and Julien Grenet

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

Using comprehensive administrative data on France's single largest financial aid program, this paper provides new evidence on the impact of large-scale need-based grant programs on the college enrollment decisions, persistence, and graduation rates of low...

The Economic and Demographic Transition, Mortality, and Comparative Development

By Matteo Cervellati and Uwe Sunde

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

This paper develops a quantifiable unified growth theory to investigate cross-country comparative development. The calibrated model can replicate the historical development dynamics in forerunner countries like Sweden and the patterns in cross-country pan...

Understanding International Prices: Customers as Capital

By Lukasz A. Drozd and Jaromir B. Nosal

American Economic Review, February 2012

The article develops a new theory of pricing to market driven by dynamic frictions of building market shares. Our key innovation is a capital theoretic model of marketing in which relations with customers are valuable. We discipline the introduced frictio...