Doing Well by Doing Good? Green Office Buildings

By Piet Eichholtz, Nils Kok, and John M. Quigley

American Economic Review, December 2010

This paper provides the first credible evidence on the economic value of "green buildings" derived from impersonal market transactions rather than engineering estimates. We analyze clusters of certified green and nearby buildings, establishing that "rated...

Real Business Cycles in Emerging Countries?

By Javier García-Cicco, Roberto Pancrazi, and Martín Uribe

American Economic Review, December 2010

We use more than a century of Argentine and Mexican data to estimate the structural parameters of a small-open-economy real-business-cycle model driven by nonstationary productivity shocks. We find that the RBC model does a poor job of explaining business...

Negative Marginal Tax Rates and Heterogeneity

By Philippe Choné and Guy Laroque

American Economic Review, December 2010

Heterogeneity is an important determinant of the shape of optimal tax schemes. This is shown here in a model à la Mirrlees. The agents differ in their productivities and opportunity costs of work, but their labor supplies depend only on a given uni...

Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

By Jose Apesteguia and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta

American Economic Review, December 2010

Emotions can have important effects on performance and socioeconomic outcomes. We study a natural experiment where two teams of professionals compete in a tournament taking turns in a sequence. As the sequential order is determined by the random outcome o...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Designing Climate Mitigation Policy

By Joseph E. Aldy, Alan J. Krupnick, Richard G. Newell, Ian W. H. Parry, and William A. Pizer

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

This paper provides (for the nonspecialist) a highly streamlined discussion of the main issues, and controversies, in the design of climate mitigation policy. The first part of the paper discusses how much action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the...

Quality Disclosure and Certification: Theory and Practice

By David Dranove and Ginger Zhe Jin

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

This essay reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on quality disclosure and certification. After comparing quality disclosure with other quality assurance mechanisms and describing a brief history of quality disclosure, we address two sets of th...

Efficiency and Redistribution: An Evaluative Review of Louis Kaplow's The Theory of Taxation and Public Economics

By Robin Boadway

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Louis Kaplow proposes a two-step methodology for normative policy analysis and illustrates it using various policy reforms. The first step is to identify efficiency gains when hypothetical lump-sum taxes can undo redistributive consequences. The second s...

Does Network Theory Connect to the Rest of Us? A Review of Matthew O. Jackson's Social and Economic Networks

By James E. Rauch

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

The ubiquity of networks in our social lives has long been recognized, and their importance in our economic lives is increasingly recognized as well. Yet the literature synthesized in Matthew O. Jackson's Social and Economic Networks, which covers the the...

Why Isn't Mexico Rich?

By Gordon H. Hanson

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Over the last three decades, Mexico has aggressively reformed its economy, opening to foreign trade and investment, achieving fiscal discipline, and privatizing state owned enterprises. Despite these efforts, the country's economic growth has been lacklu...

Why Have Economic Reforms in Mexico Not Generated Growth?

By Timothy J. Kehoe and Kim J. Ruhl

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Following its opening to trade and foreign investment in the mid-1980s, Mexico's economic growth has been modest at best, particularly in comparison with that of China. Comparing these countries and reviewing the literature, we conclude that the relation ...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

General Index of JEL Volume 48, 2010

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Index of Authors of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

Do Teenagers Respond to HIV Risk Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya

By Pascaline Dupas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We use a randomized experiment to test whether and what information changes teenagers' sexual behavior in Kenya. Providing information on the relative risk of HIV infection by partner's age led to a 28 percent decrease in teen pregnancy, an objective prox...

Transactional Sex as a Response to Risk in Western Kenya

By Jonathan Robinson and Ethan Yeh

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

Though formal and informal sex work has long been identified as crucial for the spread of HIV/AIDS, the nature of the sex-for-money market remains poorly understood. Using a unique panel dataset constructed from 192 self-reported diaries, we find that wom...