Mentors or Teachers? Microenterprise Training in Kenya

By Wyatt Brooks, Kevin Donovan, and Terence R. Johnson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

We use a randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that inexperienced female microenterprise owners in a Kenyan slum benefit from mentorship by an experienced entrepreneur in the same community. Mentorship increases profits by 20 percent on average with ...

What Do Big Data Tell Us about Why People Take Gig Economy Jobs?

By Dmitri K. Koustas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The gig economy is widely regarded to be a source of secondary or temporary income, but little is known about economic activity outside of the gig economy. Using data from a large, online personal finance application, I document the evolution of non-gig i...

Mobile Wallet and Entrepreneurial Growth

By Sumit Agarwal, Wenlan Qian, Bernard Y. Yeung, and Xin Zou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Using mobile wallet and card transaction data from a leading Singapore bank, this paper studies the effect of a mobile wallet payment technology introduction in 2017 on business growth. We find that mobile wallet usage doubled after the new technology int...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

Sickness and the city

[Research Highlight]

March 17, 2020

Long after a cholera-ridden neighborhood in London was cured, it stayed relatively poor. Why?

The Paradox of Global Thrift

By Luca Fornaro and Federica Romei

American Economic Review, November 2019

This paper describes a paradox of global thrift. Consider a world in which interest rates are low and monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound. Now imagine that governments implement prudential financial and fiscal policies to stabilize the ...

Finance and Economic Development in the Very Long Run: A Review Essay

By Yongseok Shin

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

I review William N. Goetzmann's Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible. This magnificent book offers insightful coverage of more than 5,000 years of human history under the theme of "how finance made civilization possi...

An Efficient Ascending-Bid Auction for Multiple Objects: Comment

By Noriaki Okamoto

American Economic Review, February 2018

Ausubel (2004) introduces a new ascending-bid auction rule for multiple homogeneous objects, called the Ausubel auction, which is a dynamic counterpart of the Vickrey auction. He claims that in the Ausubel auction with private values, sincere bidding by a...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

Links to individual book reviews now available online.

Cross-Country Differences in Household Stock Market Participation: The Role of Gender Norms

By Da Ke

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

What explains substantial variation across countries in household stock market participation? Building on Ke (2018), I hypothesize that the prevailing gender norm in a country is an important cultural factor. In a cross-country analysis, I find that house...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

By Richard Rogerson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Report by Committee to Appoint the Lead Editor to AER: Insights

By Jose A. Scheinkman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Report of the Treasurer

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Report: Committee on Economic Education

By Sam Allgood

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Steven Durlauf

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

By Matthew D. Shapiro

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Mind The (Profit) Gap: Why Are Female Enterprise Owners Earning Less Than Men?

By Morgan Hardy and Gisella Kagy

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We explore potential causes for the well-documented profit gap between male- and female-owned microenterprises in low-income countries. We use rich data from an ongoing field project in Ghana's garment making sector, and our study sample consists of all g...

Global Financial Cycles and the Exchange Rate Regime: A Perspective from Emerging Markets

By Maurice Obstfeld, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Mahvash S. Qureshi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper examines the claim that exchange rate regimes are of little relevance in the transmission of global financial conditions to domestic financial and macroeconomic conditions. Our findings suggest that exchange rate regimes do matter, at least for...

What Can UWE Do for Economics?

By Tatyana Avilova and Claudia Goldin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Men outnumber women as undergraduate economics majors by three to one nationwide. Even at the best research universities and liberal arts colleges men outnumber women by two to one or more. The Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge began in 2015 as a...

The Disappearing Large-Firm Wage Premium

By Nicholas Bloom, Fatih Guvenen, Benjamin S. Smith, Jae Song, and Till von Wachter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Large firms have paid significantly higher wages for over a century. Based on administrative data we document that the large-firm wage premium (LFWP) has declined steadily over the last 30 years. Decomposing pay into worker and firm fixed effects, we then...