Europe's Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson

American Economic Review, August 2012

During the age of mass migration (1850-1913), one of the largest migration episodes in history, the United States maintained a nearly open border, allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions. We estimate the return to migratio...

Dynamic Adverse Selection: A Theory of Illiquidity, Fire Sales, and Flight to Quality

By Veronica Guerrieri and Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, July 2014

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of asset markets with adverse selection. There exists a unique equilibrium in which better quality assets trade at higher prices but with a lower price-dividend ratio in less liquid markets. Sellers of high-quality a...

The Limits of Inference with Theory: A Review of Wolpin (2013)

By John Rust

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2014

This essay reviews Kenneth I. Wolpin's (2013) monograph The Limits of Inference without Theory, which arose from lectures he presented at the Cowles Foundation in 2010 in honor of Tjalling Koopmans. While I readily agree with Wolpin's basic premise that e...

New Challenges in Multihospital Kidney Exchange

By Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, May 2012

The growth of kidney exchange presents new challenges for the design of kidney exchange clearinghouses. The players now include directors of transplant centers, who see sets of patient-donor pairs, and can choose to reveal only difficult-to-match pairs to...

Labor Supply and Household Dynamics

By Maurizio Mazzocco, Claudia Ruiz, and Shintaro Yamaguchi

American Economic Review, May 2014

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we provide evidence that to understand household decisions and evaluate policies designed to affect individual welfare, it is important to add an intertemporal dimension to the by-now standard static collective mo...

The Great Equalizer: Health Care Access and Infant Mortality in Thailand

By Jonathan Gruber, Nathaniel Hendren, and Robert M. Townsend

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

This paper analyzes Thailand's 2001 healthcare reform, "30 Baht." The program increased funding available to hospitals to care for the poor and reduced copays to 30 Baht (~$0.75). Our estimates suggest the supply-side funding of the program increased h...

Estimating the Peace Dividend: The Impact of Violence on House Prices in Northern Ireland

By Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller

American Economic Review, April 2012

This article exploits data on the pattern of violence across regions and over time to estimate the impact of the peace process in Northern Ireland on house prices. After establishing a negative correlation between killings and house prices, we estimate th...

Do Matching Frictions Explain Unemployment? Not in Bad Times

By Pascal Michaillat

American Economic Review, June 2012

This paper proposes a search-and-matching model of unemployment in which jobs are rationed: the labor market does not clear in the absence of matching frictions. This job shortage arises in an economic equilibrium from the combination of some wage rigidit...

Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care

By Joseph J. Doyle Jr.

American Economic Review, December 2007

Little is known about the effects of placing children who are abused or neglected into foster care. This paper uses the placement tendency of child protection investigators as an instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care on long-te...

Just Enough or All: Selling a Firm

By Mehmet Ekmekci, Nenad Kos, and Rakesh Vohra

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

We consider the problem of selling a firm to a single buyer. The buyer privately knows post-sale cash flows and the benefits of control. Unlike the case where buyer's private information is one-dimensional, the optimal mechanism is a menu of tuples of cas...

Financial Stability, the Trilemma, and International Reserves

By Maurice Obstfeld, Jay C. Shambaugh, and Alan M. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

The rapid growth of international reserves, a development concentrated in the emerging markets, remains a puzzle. In this paper, we suggest that a model based on financial stability and financial openness goes far toward explaining reserve holdings in ...

Getting beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City

By Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

In this paper, we collect data on the inner-workings of 39 charter schools and correlate these data with school effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input measures -- class size, per-pupil expenditure, teacher certification, and teacher ...

Cyclical Variation in Labor Hours and Productivity Using the ATUS

By Michael C. Burda, Daniel S. Hamermesh, and Jay Stewart

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data from 2003 to 2010. The data sources include the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both...

Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration

By Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson

American Economic Review, April 2016

The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large ...

Game Theory and Cold War Rationality: A Review Essay

By E. Roy Weintraub

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

This essay reviews new histories of the role of game theory and rational decision making in shaping the social sciences, economics among them, in the postwar period. The recent books The World the Game Theorists Made by Paul Erickson and How Rea...

The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption and Saving

[Symposium: Consumption Behaviour]

By Martin Browning and Thomas F. Crossley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

A central implication of life-cycle models is that agents smooth consumption. We review the empirical evidence on smoothing at frequencies from within the year up to across a lifetime. We find that life-cycle models--particular those which incorporate rea...

Treasure Islands

[Symposium: Tax Havens]

By James R. Hines Jr.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

In movies and novels, tax havens are often settings for shady international deals; in practice, they are rather less flashy. Tax havens, also known as "offshore financial centers" or "international financial centers," are countries and territories that of...

Skill Transferability, Migration, and Development: Evidence from Population Resettlement in Indonesia

By Samuel Bazzi, Arya Gaduh, Alexander D. Rothenberg, and Maisy Wong

American Economic Review, September 2016

We use a natural experiment in Indonesia to provide causal evidence on the role of location-specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity. From 1979-1988, the Transmigration Program relocated two mill...

Malaria Eradication in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure

By Hoyt Bleakley

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

This study uses the malaria-eradication campaigns in the United States (circa 1920) and in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (circa 1955) to measure how much childhood exposure to malaria depresses labor productivity. The campaigns began because of advances...

The "New Political Economy": Recent Books by Allen Drazen and by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini

By Gilles Saint-Paul

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2000

The last fifteen years have seen an explosion of contributions in the field of political economy. Two new books, Political Economy in Macroeconomics by Allan Drazen and Political Economy: Explaining Economic Policy by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, ...