The Growth Potential of Startups over the Business Cycle

By Petr Sedláček and Vincent Sterk

American Economic Review, October 2017

This paper shows that employment in cohorts of US firms is strongly influenced by aggregate conditions at the time of their entry. Employment fluctuations of startups are procyclical, they persist into later years, and cohort-level employment variations a...

Firm-Related Risk and Precautionary Saving Response

By Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, May 2017

We propose a new approach to identify the strength of the precautionary motive and the extent of self-insurance in response to earnings risk based on Euler equation estimates. To address endogeneity problems, we use Norwegian administrative data and instr...

Sanitation and Education

By Anjali Adukia

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

I explore whether the absence of school sanitation infrastructure impedes educational attainment, particularly among pubescent-age girls, using a national Indian school latrine construction initiative and administrative school-level data. School latrine c...

Taxes and Time Use: Fiscal Policy in a Household Production Model

By Kelly S. Ragan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Time use data on work and leisure is presented for a broad group of OECD countries. The home production model explicitly accounts for taxes and public expenditures on day care and elder care, substitutes for work households perform at home. Taxes are im...

Reference Prices, Costs, and Nominal Rigidities

By Martin Eichenbaum, Nir Jaimovich, and Sergio Rebelo

American Economic Review, February 2011

We assess the importance of nominal rigidities using a new weekly scanner dataset. We find that nominal rigidities take the form of inertia in reference prices and costs, defined as the most common prices and costs within a given quarter. Reference price...

Matthew Gentzkow, Winner of the 2014 Clark Medal

By Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

The 2014 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The citation recognized Matt's "fundamental contributions to our understanding of the economic fo...

Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects

By Charles A. Holt and Susan K. Laury

American Economic Review, December 2002

Internet Penetration and Capacity Utilization in the US Airline Industry

By James D. Dana Jr. and Eugene Orlov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

Airline capacity utilization increased dramatically between 1993 and 2007, after staying fairly level following deregulation. We argue that consumers' use of the Internet to investigate and purchase airline tickets reduces market frictions and allows a...

Global Cycles: Capital Flows, Commodities, and Sovereign Defaults, 1815-2015

By Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Review, May 2016

Capital flow and commodity cycles have long been connected with economic crises. Sparse historical data, however, has made it difficult to connect their timing. We date turning points in global capital flows and commodity prices across two centuries and p...

Market Size, Competition, and the Product Mix of Exporters

By Thierry Mayer, Marc J. Melitz, and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

American Economic Review, February 2014

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how competition across market destinations affects both a firm's exported product range and product mix. We show how tougher competition in an export market induces a firm to skew its ...

Mortgage Modification and Strategic Behavior: Evidence from a Legal Settlement with Countrywide

By Christopher Mayer, Edward Morrison, Tomasz Piskorski, and Arpit Gupta

American Economic Review, September 2014

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by settlement of U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corpor...

Investment Dispersion and the Business Cycle

By Rüdiger Bachmann and Christian Bayer

American Economic Review, April 2014

The cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level investment rates is procyclical. This makes investment rates different from productivity, output, and employment growth, which have countercyclical dispersions. A calibrated heterogeneous-firm business cycle...

Inequality, Income Growth, and Mobility: The Basic Facts

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By Peter Gottschalk

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

This essay brings together the factual material on changes in the distribution of labor market income that any of the theories addressed in the other papers in this symposium must address. The broad stylized facts are that the rapid growth and stable leve...

Income, Health, and Well-Being around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll

[Symposium: Development]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

During 2006, the Gallup Organization conducted a World Poll that used an identical questionnaire for national samples of adults from 132 countries. I analyze the data on life satisfaction and on health satisfaction and look at their relationships with nat...

The Role of the Exchange Rate in Monetary-Policy Rules

By John B. Taylor

American Economic Review, May 2001

Priceless: The Nonpecuniary Benefits of Schooling

By Philip Oreopoulos and Kjell G. Salvanes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Increasing wealth provides key motivation for students to forgo earnings and struggle through exams. But, as we argue in this paper, schooling generates many experiences and affects many dimensions of skill that, in turn, affect central aspects of individ...

Retrospectives: Friedrich Hayek and the Market Algorithm

By Samuel Bowles, Alan Kirman, and Rajiv Sethi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) is known for his vision of the market economy as an information processing system characterized by spontaneous order: the emergence of coherence through the independent actions of large numbers of individuals, each with limi...

Consumption and Income Inequality and the Great Recession

By Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine changes in consumption and income inequality between 2000 and 2011. During the most recent recession, unemployment rose and asset values declined sharply. We investigate how the recession affected inequality while addressing concerns about unde...

The Limited Influence of Unemployment on the Wage Bargain

By Robert E. Hall and Paul R. Milgrom

American Economic Review, September 2008

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective joint surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may have limited influence. The job-seeker's only credible threat during bargai...

Wheat from Chaff: Meta-analysis as Quantitative Literature Review

By T. D. Stanley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

This paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research, meta-regression analysis or MRA. Economics is theory-driven. Yet, we must learn empirically if economics is to advance. MRA offers a more obj...