Modern Medicine and the Twentieth Century Decline in Mortality: Evidence on the Impact of Sulfa Drugs

By Seema Jayachandran, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Kimberly V. Smith

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

This paper studies the contribution of sulfa drugs, a groundbreaking medical innovation in the 1930s, to declines in US mortality. For several infectious diseases, sulfa drugs represented the first effective treatment. Using time-series and difference-...

Information, Preferences, and Public Benefit Participation: Experimental Evidence from the Advance EITC and 401(k) Savings

By Damon Jones

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Within a field experiment, I present a treatment group with reductions in information, administrative, stigma, and procrastination costs associated with the Advance EITC. The treatment increases Advance participation from 0.3 to 1.2 percent. Another tr...

Promoting Healthy Choices: Information versus Convenience

By Jessica Wisdom, Julie S. Downs, and George Loewenstein

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Success in slowing obesity trends would benefit from policies aimed at reducing calorie consumption. In a field experiment at a fast-food sandwich chain, we address the effects of providing calorie information, mimicking recent legislation, and test an...

Disclosure by Politicians

By Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We collect data on the rules and practices of financial and conflict disclosure by members of Parliament in 175 countries. Although two-thirds of the countries have some disclosure laws, less than one-third make disclosures available to the public, and...

An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Gap in Mathematics

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We document and analyze the emergence of a substantial gender gap in mathematics in the early years of schooling using a large, recent, and nationally representative panel of US children. There are no mean differences between boys and girls upon entry ...

Identification of Social Interactions through Partially Overlapping Peer Groups

By Giacomo De Giorgi, Michele Pellizzari, and Silvia Redaelli

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

In this paper, we demonstrate that, in a context where peer groups do not overlap fully, it is possible to identify all the relevant parameters of the standard linear-in-means model of social interactions. We apply this novel identification structure t...

Labor Markets and Monetary Policy: A New Keynesian Model with Unemployment

By Olivier Blanchard and Jordi Galí

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

We construct a utility-based model of fluctuations with nominal rigidities and unemployment. We first show that under a standard utility specification, productivity shocks have no effect on unemployment in the constrained efficient allocation. That pro...

How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?

By Jennifer Hunt and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

We measure the extent to which skilled immigrants increase innovation in the United States. The 2003 National Survey of College Graduates shows that immigrants patent at double the native rate, due to their disproportionately holding science and engine...

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 ...

Putting the Parts Together: Trade, Vertical Linkages, and Business Cycle Comovement

By Julian di Giovanni and Andrei A. Levchenko

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Countries that trade more with each other exhibit higher business cycle correlation. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying this relationship using a large cross-country, industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. We sho...

Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from an Estimated DSGE Model

By Matteo Iacoviello and Stefano Neri

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

We study sources and consequences of fluctuations in the US housing market. Slow technological progress in the housing sector explains the upward trend in real housing prices of the last 40 years. Over the business cycle, housing demand and housing tec...

Accounting for the Rise in Consumer Bankruptcies

By Igor Livshits, James MacGee, and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Personal bankruptcies in the United States have increased dramatically, rising from 1.4 per thousand working age adults in 1970 to 8.5 in 2002. We use a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with competitive lenders to evaluate several commonly offered ...

Globalization and Innovation in Emerging Markets

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Jan Svejnar, and Katherine Terrell

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Globalization brings opportunities and pressures for domestic firms in emerging markets to innovate and improve their competitive position. Using data from 27 emerging market economies, we estimate the effects of foreign competition and linkages with f...

Offshoring in a Ricardian World

By Andrés Rodríguez-Clare

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

This paper proposes a Ricardian model to understand the short-run and long-run aggregate effects of increased fragmentation and offshoring on rich and poor countries. The short-run analysis shows that, when offshoring is sufficiently high, further incr...

Business Volatility, Job Destruction, and Unemployment

By Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent by the mid 1990s. Using low frequency movements in industry-level data, we estimate that a 1 percentage point drop in the quarterly job destruction rate lo...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design Is Taking the Con out of Econometrics

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Since Edward Leamer's memorable 1983 paper, "Let's Take the Con out of Econometrics," empirical microeconomics has experienced a credibility revolution. While Leamer's suggested remedy, sensitivity analysis, has played a role in this, we argue that the pr...

Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Edward E. Leamer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

My first reaction to "The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics," authored by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, was: Wow! This paper makes a stunningly good case for relying on purposefully randomized or accidentally randomized expe...