Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics?

By Thushyanthan Baskaran and Zohal Hessami

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Women remain underrepresented in politics and it remains unclear how this might change. In this paper, we investigate whether female council candidates receive more preferential votes when a female mayor has been recently elected into office. We hand coll...

Identification in Macroeconomics

[Symposium: Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession]

By Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

This paper discusses empirical approaches macroeconomists use to answer questions like: What does monetary policy do? How large are the effects of fiscal stimulus? What caused the Great Recession? Why do some countries grow faster than others? Identificat...

The Taxing Deed of Globalization

By Peter H. Egger, Sergey Nigai, and Nora M. Strecker

American Economic Review, February 2019

This paper examines the effects of globalization on the distribution of worker-specific labor taxes using a unique set of tax calculators. We find a differential effect of higher trade and factor mobility on relative tax burdens in 1980–1993 versus 1994...

The State of New Keynesian Economics: A Partial Assessment

[Symposium: Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession]

By Jordi Galí

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

In August 2007, when the first signs emerged of what would come to be the most damaging global financial crisis since the Great Depression, the New Keynesian paradigm was dominant in macroeconomics. Ten years later, tons of ammunition has been fired again...

Incentives and Unintended Consequences: Spillover Effects in Food Choice

By Manuela Angelucci, Silvia Prina, Heather Royer, and Anya Samek

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Little is known about how peers influence the impact of incentives. We study how peers' actions and incentives can lead to peer spillover effects. Using a field experiment on snack choice in the school lunchroom (choice of grapes versus cookies), we rando...

Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation

By Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

We quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor across US cities and its aggregate costs. Misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply...

Alcohol and Self-Control: A Field Experiment in India

By Frank Schilbach

American Economic Review, April 2019

This paper studies alcohol consumption among low-income workers in India. In a 3-week field experiment, the majority of 229 cycle-rickshaw drivers were willing to forgo substantial monetary payments in order to set incentives for themselves to remain sobe...

Measuring Success in Education: The Role of Effort on the Test Itself

By Uri Gneezy, John A. List, Jeffrey A. Livingston, Xiangdong Qin, Sally Sadoff, and Yang Xu

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

US students often rank poorly on standardized tests that estimate and compare educational achievements. We investigate whether this might reflect not only differences in ability but also differences in effort on the test. We experimentally offer students ...

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?

By Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin

American Economic Review, August 2019

We examine how the premature death of eminent life scientists alters the vitality of their fields. While the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases after the death of a star scientist, the flow of articles by non-collaborators in...

Comparing UK Tax Returns of Foreign Multinationals to Matched Domestic Firms

By Katarzyna Anna Bilicka

American Economic Review, August 2019

In this paper, I use confidential UK corporate tax returns data to explore whether there are systematic differences in the amount of taxable profits that multinational and domestic companies report. I find that the ratio of taxable profits to total assets...

Is Inflation Default? The Role of Information in Debt Crises

By Marco Bassetto and Carlo Galli

American Economic Review, October 2019

We study the information sensitivity of government debt denominated in domestic versus foreign currency: the former is subject to inflation risk and the latter to default. Default only affects sophisticated bond traders, whereas inflation concerns a large...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

The Gains from Input Trade with Heterogeneous Importers

By Joaquin Blaum, Claire Lelarge, and Michael Peters

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

Firms differ substantially in their participation in foreign input markets. We develop a methodology to measure the aggregate effects of input trade that takes such heterogeneity into account. We provide a theoretical result that holds in a variety of set...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

A Quantitative Theory of Information, Worker Flows, and Wage Dispersion

By Amanda M. Michaud

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

Employer learning provides a link between wage and employment dynamics. Workers who are selectively terminated when their low productivity is revealed subsequently earn lower wages. If learning is asymmetric across employers, randomly separated high-produ...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Selling to Advised Buyers

By Andrey Malenko and Anton Tsoy

American Economic Review, April 2019

In many cases, buyers are not informed about their valuations and rely on experts, who are informed but biased for overbidding. We study auction design when selling to such "advised buyers." We show that a canonical dynamic auction, the English auction, h...

Riddles and Models: A Review Essay on Michel De Vroey's A History of Macroeconomics from Keynes to Lucas and Beyond

By Costas Azariadis

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

This essay reviews Michel De Vroey's important new book on the history of macroeconomics, which extends to business cycles an earlier book by the same author on the history of involuntary unemployment. The review also offers a broader nontechnical surve...