Estimating Risk Preferences in the Field

By Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, Ted O'Donoghue, and Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

We survey the literature on estimating risk preferences using field data. We concentrate our attention on studies in which risk preferences are the focal object and estimating their structure is the core enterprise. We review a number of models of risk ...

Global Firms

By Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Research in international trade has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, as attention has shifted from countries and industries towards the firms actually engaged in international trade. The now-standard heterogeneous firm model posits mea...

Inequality and Globalization: A Review Essay

By Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

As normally measured, "global inequality" is the relative inequality of incomes found among all people in the world no matter where they live. Francois Bourguignon and Branko Milanovic have written insightful and timely books on global inequality, emp...

Medieval Origins: A Review Essay on Campbell's The Great Transition

By Eric Chaney

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Bruce M. S. Campbell's The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World is a significant contribution to the growing literature that traces the roots of Europe's economic rise to the climatic and population shocks...

On Measuring Multidimensional Deprivation

By Prasanta K. Pattanaik and Yongsheng Xu

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

This essay presents a critical review of the recent book by Alkire et al. entitled Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis, and, in the course of doing so, it also discusses some general issues that come up in this context. We outli...

Review of Global Tax Fairness, Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta, Editors

By Matthew Weinzierl

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

This timely volume (Global Tax Fairness, edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta) on the proper taxation of multinational enterprises argues that several feasible, near-term reforms could substantially narrow the scope for tax avoidance by closi...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Corrigendum: Review of Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics by George F. Demartino and Diedre N. McCloskey, Reviewed by Anne Krueger

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

The Impacts of Industrial and Entrepreneurial Work on Income and Health: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

By Christopher Blattman and Stefan Dercon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Working with five Ethiopian firms, we randomized applicants to an industrial job offer, an "entrepreneurship" program of $300 plus business training, or control status. Industrial jobs offered more and steadier hours but low wages and risky conditions. Th...

Saving by Default: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural India

By Vincent Somville and Lore Vandewalle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Access to banks is rapidly increasing worldwide, and allows account-based instead of cash transfers. We conduct a randomized experiment documenting the impact of the payment method on savings behavior. In India, we allocate identical weekly payments into ...

The Persistent Power of Behavioral Change: Long-Run Impacts of Temporary Savings Subsidies for the Poor

By Simone Schaner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

I use a field experiment in rural Kenya to study how temporary incentives to save impact long-run economic outcomes. Study participants randomly selected to receive large temporary interest rates on an individual bank account had significantly more income...

Paying to Avoid Recession: Using Reenlistment to Estimate the Cost of Unemployment

By Mark Borgschulte and Paco Martorell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

This paper provides revealed-preference estimates of the monetary value to workers of a lower unemployment rate at the time of job separation. By examining the decision between reenlisting and exiting the military, we find that service members would sacri...

Do Free Trade Agreements Affect Tariffs of Nonmember Countries? A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

By Kamal Saggi, Andrey Stoyanov, and Halis Murat Yildiz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

We investigate the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on tariffs of non-member countries. In our multi-country model, the formation of an FTA leads members to reduce their exports to the rest of the world. Such external trade diversion weakens the ab...

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

By Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We find that unexpe...

The Family Peer Effect on Mothers' Labor Supply

By Cheti Nicoletti, Kjell G. Salvanes, and Emma Tominey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

The historical rise in female labor force participation has flattened in recent decades, but the proportion of mothers working full-time has increased. We provide the first empirical evidence that the increase in mothers' working hours is amplified throug...

Exploiting Externalities to Estimate the Long-Term Effects of Early Childhood Deworming

By Owen Ozier

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

I investigate whether a school-based deworming intervention in Kenya had long-term effects on young children. I exploit positive externalities from the program to estimate impacts on younger children who were not directly treated. Ten years after the inte...

The Neighborhood Impacts of Local Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Urban Mexico

By Craig McIntosh, Tito Alegría, Gerardo Ordóñez, and René Zenteno

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

This paper reports on the results of a large infrastructure investment experiment in which $68 million in spending was randomly allocated across a set of low-income urban neighborhoods in Mexico. We show that the program resulted in substantial improvemen...