General Index for Volume XLVII

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

Index of Authors of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

The Effect of Bans and Taxes on Passive Smoking

By Jérôme Adda and Francesca Cornaglia

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

We evaluate the effect of smoking bans and excise taxes on the exposure to tobacco smoke of nonsmokers, and we show their unintended consequences on children. Smoking bans perversely increase nonsmokers' exposure by displacing smokers to private places...

Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

By Shin-Yi Chou, Jin-Tan Liu, Michael Grossman, and Ted Joyce

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openi...

Intergenerational Networks, Unemployment, and Persistent Inequality in South Africa

By Jeremy R. Magruder

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

This paper examines the importance of network-based intergenerational correlations in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children's employment with the usefulness of parents in their job search. I...

Parents' Incomes and Children's Outcomes: A Quasi-experiment Using Transfer Payments from Casino Profits

By Randall K. Q. Akee, William E. Copeland, Gordon Keeler, Adrian Angold, and E. Jane Costello

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

We examine the role an exogenous increase in household income, due to a government transfer unrelated to household characteristics, plays in children's long-run outcomes. Children in affected households have higher levels of education in their young ad...

The Changing Consequences of Attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

Using nationally representative data files from 1970s and 1990s college attendees, we find that in the 1970s matriculation at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) was associated with higher wages and an increased probability of graduati...

Prize Structure and Information in Tournaments: Experimental Evidence

By Richard B. Freeman and Alexander M. Gelber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

This paper examines behavior in a tournament in which we vary the tournament prize structure and the available information about participants' skill at the task of solving mazes. The number of solved mazes is lowest when payments are independent of per...

Age at Arrival, English Proficiency, and Social Assimilation among US Immigrants

By Hoyt Bleakley and Aimee Chin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

Are the English proficiency and social outcomes of US immigrants the result of their cultural preferences or of more fundamental constraints? Using 2000 census microdata, we relate the English proficiency, marriage, fertility, and residential location ...

Present-Biased Preferences and Credit Card Borrowing

By Stephan Meier and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

Some individuals borrow extensively on their credit cards. This paper tests whether present-biased time preferences correlate with credit card borrowing. In a field study, we elicit individual time preferences with incentivized choice experiments, and ...

Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone's Kids

By Scott E. Carrell and Mark L. Hoekstra

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

There is a widespread perception that externalities from troubled children are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by ...

A Theory of Military Dictatorships

By Daron Acemoglu, Davide Ticchi, and Andrea Vindigni

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

We investigate how nondemocratic regimes use the military and how this can lead to the emergence of military dictatorships. The elite may build a strong military and make the concessions necessary for the military to behave as their perfect agent, or t...

Inflation-Gap Persistence in the US

By Timothy Cogley, Giorgio E. Primiceri, and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

We estimate vector autoregressions with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatility to investigate whether US inflation persistence has changed. We focus on the inflation gap, defined as the difference between inflation and trend inflation, and we mea...

The TIPS Yield Curve and Inflation Compensation

By Refet S. Gürkaynak, Brian Sack, and Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

For over ten years, the Treasury has issued index-linked debt. This paper describes the methodology for fitting a smoothed yield curve to these securities that is used at the Federal Reserve Board every day, and makes the estimates public. Comparison with...

Why Are Saving Rates of Urban Households in China Rising?

By Marcos D. Chamon and Eswar S. Prasad

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household savings rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to about one-quarter of disposable income. Savings rates increased across all demographic groups, and the age profile of savings has an unusual pattern in r...

Firm Heterogeneity and the Long-Run Effects of Dividend Tax Reform

By François Gourio and Jianjun Miao

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

To study the long-run effect of dividend taxation on aggregate capital accumulation, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which there is a continuum of firms subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We find that a dividend tax cut raises...

Productivity Differences between and within Countries

By Daron Acemoglu and Melissa Dell

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

We document substantial within-country (cross-municipality) differences in incomes for a large number of countries in the Americas. A significant fraction of the within-country differences cannot be explained by observed human capital. We conjecture that...

Why Does Misallocation Persist?

By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Benjamin Moll

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

Recent papers argue that the misallocation of resources can explain large cross-country TFP differences. This argument is underpinned by empirical evidence documenting substantial dispersion in the marginal products of resources, particularly capital, in ...

Development Accounting

By Chang-Tai Hsieh and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

Researchers have made much progress in the past 25 years in accounting for the proximate determinants of income levels: physical capital, human capital, and Total Factor Productivity (TFP). But we still know little about why these factors vary. We argue ...

The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital

By Charles I. Jones and Paul M. Romer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

In 1961, Nicholas Kaldor highlighted six "stylized" facts to summarize the patterns that economists had discovered in national income accounts and to shape the growth models being developed to explain them. Redoing this exercise today shows just how much...