Resource Constraints and the Criminal Justice System: Evidence from Judicial Vacancies

By Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

Ten percent of federal judgeships are currently vacant, yet little is known on the impact of these vacancies on criminal justice outcomes. Using judge deaths and pension eligibility as instruments for vacancies, I find that prosecutors dismiss more cases ...

Entry, Exit, and Investment-Specific Technical Change

By Roberto M. Samaniego

American Economic Review, March 2010

Using European data, this paper finds that (i) industry entry and exit rates are positively related to industry rates of investment-specific technical change (ISTC); and (ii) the sensitivity of industry entry and exit rates to cross-country differences...

Do Colleges Shortchange Women? Gender Differences in the Transition from College to Work

By Lois Joy

American Economic Review, May 2000

Sudden Stops, Financial Crises, and Leverage

By Enrique G. Mendoza

American Economic Review, December 2010

Financial crashes were followed by deep recessions in the Sudden Stops of emerging economies. An equilibrium business cycle model with a collateral constraint explains this phenomenon as a result of the amplification and asymmetry that the constraint ind...

An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis

By Jahn K. Hakes and Raymond D. Sauer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

Michael Lewis's book, Moneyball, describes how an innovative manager working for the Oakland Athletics successfully exploited an inefficiency in baseball's labor market over a prolonged period of time. We evaluate Lewis's claims by applying standar...

Finance and Development: A Tale of Two Sectors

By Francisco J. Buera, Joseph P. Kaboski, and Yongseok Shin

American Economic Review, August 2011

We develop a quantitative framework to explain the relationship between aggregate/sector-level total factor productivity (TFP) and financial development across countries. Financial frictions distort the allocation of capital and entrepreneurial talent acr...

US State Fiscal Policy and Natural Resources

By Alexander James

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

An analytical framework predicts that, in response to an exogenous increase in resource-based government revenue, a benevolent government will partially substitute away from taxing income, increase spending and save. Fifty-one years of US-state level data...

Exchange Rate Predictability

By Barbara Rossi

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2013

The main goal of this article is to provide an answer to the question: does anything forecast exchange rates, and if so, which variables? It is well known that exchange rate fluctuations are very difficult to predict using economic models, and that a r...

Has the US Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation

By Thomas Philippon

American Economic Review, April 2015

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again aft...

How Is Tax Policy Conducted over the Business Cycle?

By Carlos A. Vegh and Guillermo Vuletin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

It is well known by now that government spending has typically been procyclical in developing economies but acyclical or countercyclical in industrial countries. Little, if any, is known, however, about the cyclical behavior of tax rates (as opposed to ta...

A Quantitative Review of Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family by Carbone and Cahn

By Kirsten Cornelson and Aloysius Siow

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

June Carbone and Naomi Cahn argue that growing earnings inequality and the increased educational attainment of women, relative to men, have led to declining marriage rates for less-educated women and an increase in positive assortative matching since the ...

Multiple Dimensions of Private Information: Evidence from the Long-Term Care Insurance Market

By Amy Finkelstein and Kathleen McGarry

American Economic Review, September 2006

We demonstrate the existence of multiple dimensions of private information in the long-term care insurance market. Two types of people purchase insurance: individuals with private information that they are high risk and individuals with private informa...

Under the Weather: Health, Schooling, and Economic Consequences of Early-Life Rainfall

By Sharon Maccini and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, June 2009

We examine the effect of early-life rainfall on the health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes of Indonesian adults. We link historical rainfall for each individual's birth year and birth location with adult outcomes from the 2000 Indonesia Family Life...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Retrospectives: On the Definition of Economics

By Roger E. Backhouse and Steven G. Medema

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

Modern economists do not subscribe to a homogeneous definition of their subject. Surveying definitions of economics from contemporary principles of economics textbooks, we find that economics is the study of the economy, the study of the coordination proc...

Impatience and Uncertainty: Experimental Decisions Predict Adolescents' Field Behavior

By Matthias Sutter, Martin G. Kocher, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler, and Stefan T. Trautmann

American Economic Review, February 2013

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment and relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found ...

Schooling and Labor Market Consequences of School Construction in Indonesia: Evidence from an Unusual Policy Experiment

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, September 2001

Between 1973 and 1978, the Indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record. Combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the p...