Outside the Box: Unconventional Monetary Policy in the Great Recession and Beyond

[Symposium: Unconventional Monetary Policy]

By Kenneth N. Kuttner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

In November 2008, the Federal Reserve faced a deteriorating economy and a financial crisis. The federal funds rate had already been reduced to virtually zero. Thus, the Federal Reserve turned to unconventional monetary policies. Through "quantitative easi...

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

By Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-app...

Long-Run Effects of Temporary Incentives on Medical Care Productivity

By Pablo A. Celhay, Paul J. Gertler, Paula Giovagnoli, and Christel Vermeersch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

We show that costs of adjustment as opposed to low perceived value may explain why improved quality care practices diffuse slowly in the medical industry. Using a randomized field experiment conducted in Argentina, we find that temporary financial incenti...

A Review Essay on Howard Bodenhorn's The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

By Allison Shertzer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

In The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South, Howard Bodenhorn investigates the origins, health, and socioeconomic performance of mixed-race people in the antebellum Southern United States. The c...

Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues

By Charles Angelucci and Julia Cagé

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

We model the consequences on newspapers' content and prices of a reduction in advertising revenues. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in their ideal amount of journalistic-intensive content. We show that a reducti...

Market Share Contracts, Exclusive Dealing, and the Integer Problem

By Zhijun Chen and Greg Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2019

This paper compares exclusive dealing and market share contracts in a model of naked exclusion. We discuss how the contracts work and identify a fundamental trade-off that arises: market share contracts are better at maximizing a seller's benefit from f...

Incentivizing Safer Sexual Behavior: Evidence from a Lottery Experiment on HIV Prevention

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Lucia Corno, Damien de Walque, and Jakob Svensson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

We investigate the effect of a financial lottery program in Lesotho with relatively low expected payments but a chance to win a high prize conditional on negative test results for sexually transmitted infections. The intervention resulted in a 21.4 percen...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Dynamic Mechanism Design: An Introduction

By Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Välimäki

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

We provide an introduction to the recent developments of dynamic mechanism design, with a primary focus on the quasilinear case. First, we describe socially optimal (or efficient) dynamic mechanisms. These mechanisms extend the well-known Vickrey–Clarkâ...

Dominant Currency Paradigm

By Gita Gopinath, Emine Boz, Camila Casas, Federico J. Díez, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

American Economic Review, March 2020

We propose a "dominant currency paradigm" with three key features: dominant currency pricing, pricing complementarities, and imported inputs in production. We test this paradigm using a new dataset of bilateral price and volume indices for more than 2,5...

Internal Geography, Labor Mobility, and the Distributional Impacts of Trade

By Jingting Fan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

I develop a spatial-equilibrium model to quantify the distributional impacts of international trade in an economy with intranational trade and migration costs. Focusing on China, I find that international trade increases both between-region inequality amo...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

Life-Cycle Consumption Patterns at Older Ages in the United States and the United Kingdom: Can Medical Expenditures Explain the Difference?

By James Banks, Richard Blundell, Peter Levell, and James P. Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

This paper documents significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures at older ages in the United Kingdom compared to the United States, in spite of income paths being similar. Several possible causes are explored, including different employment ...

The Value of US Government Data to US Business Decisions

[Symposium: Public Provision of Economic Data]

By Ellen Hughes-Cromwick and Julia Coronado

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The US government is a major producer of economic and financial data, statistics, analysis, and forecasts that are gathered, compiled, and published as public goods for use by citizens, government agencies, researchers, nonprofits, and the business comm...

The Introduction of Tasers and Police Use of Firearms: Evidence from the Chicago Police Department

By Bocar Ba and Jeffrey Grogger

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Many police jurisdictions have recently expanded their Taser arsenals with a goal of reducing officer-involved shootings. We analyze substitution between Tasers and firearms by means of an event study made possible by a policy change at the Chicago Police...

A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation

By Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen, and Heidi Williams

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to underprovide innovation because of the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the United States and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summarize the pros and cons ...