The Macrogenoeconomics of Comparative Development

By Quamrul H. Ashraf and Oded Galor

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

The importance of evolutionary forces for comparative economic performance across societies has been the focus of a vibrant literature, highlighting the roles played by the Neolithic Revolution as well as the prehistoric "out of Africa" migration of ana...

Rising Government Debt: Causes and Solutions for a Decades-Old Trend

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Pierre Yared

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Over the past four decades, government debt as a fraction of GDP has been on an upward trajectory in advanced economies, approaching levels not reached since World War II. While normative macroeconomic theories can explain the increase in the level of d...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

By Johannes Hörner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Artificial Intelligence: The Ambiguous Labor Market Impact of Automating Prediction

[Symposium: Automation and Employment]

By Ajay Agrawal, Joshua S. Gans, and Avi Goldfarb

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are primarily driven by machine learning, a prediction technology. Prediction is useful because it is an input into decision-making. In order to appreciate the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, it is imp...

Payroll Taxes, Firm Behavior, and Rent Sharing: Evidence from a Young Workers' Tax Cut in Sweden

By Emmanuel Saez, Benjamin Schoefer, and David Seim

American Economic Review, May 2019

This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large employer-borne payroll tax rate cut for young workers in Sweden. We find no effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to slightly older untreated workers, and a 2–3 percentage poi...

The Changing (Dis-)utility of Work

[Symposium: Incentives in the Workplace]

By Greg Kaplan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

We study how changes in the distribution of occupations have affected the aggregate non-pecuniary costs and benefits of working. The physical toll of work is less now than in 1950, with workers shifting away from occupations in which people report experie...

Taxes and US Oil Production: Evidence from California and the Windfall Profit Tax

By Nirupama L. Rao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

The recent boom in U.S. oil production has prompted debates on levying new taxes on oil. This paper uses new well-level production data and price variation from federal oil taxes and price controls to assess how taxes affected production. After-tax price ...

The Intensity of Job Search and Search Duration

By R. Jason Faberman and Marianna Kudlyak

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We use online job application data to study the relationship between search intensity and search duration. The data allow us to control for job seeker composition and the evolution of available job openings over the duration of search. We find that, withi...

Economic Insecurity and the Causes of Populism, Reconsidered

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Yotam Margalit

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Growing conventional wisdom holds that a chief driver of the populist vote is economic insecurity. I contend that this view overstates the role of economic insecurity as an explanation in several ways. First, it conflates the significance of economic in...

Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

By Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb

American Economic Review, April 2020

Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while re...

Industrial Espionage and Productivity

By Albrecht Glitz and Erik Meyersson

American Economic Review, April 2020

In this paper, we investigate the economic returns to industrial espionage. We show that the flow of information provided by East German informants in the West over the period 1970–1989 led to a significant narrowing of sectoral TFP gaps between West an...

The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men

[Symposium: The Problems of Men]

By Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, Andrew Cherlin, and Robert Francis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class me...

Who Acquires Information in Dealer Markets?

By Jesper Rüdiger and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Review, April 2020

We study information acquisition in dealer markets. We first identify a one-sided strategic complementarity in information acquisition: the more informed traders are, the larger market makers' gain from becoming informed. When quotes are observable, this ...

Is This Tax Reform, or Just Confusion?

[Symposium: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act]

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

Based on the experience of recent decades, the United States apparently musters the political will to change its tax system comprehensively about every 30 years, so it seems especially important to get it right when the chance arises. Based on the strong ...

Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting, Atlanta, GA, January 4, 2019

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

Modern Family? Paternity Leave and Marital Stability

By Daniel Avdic and Arizo Karimi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

We study how relationship stability of couples is affected by an increase in fathers' involvement in staying home from work with young children. We make use of a parental leave reform in Sweden that earmarked one month of paid leave to each parent in a re...

Stealing trade secrets

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How much does state-sponsored industrial espionage pay?

Religion, Division of Labor, and Conflict: Anti-semitism in Germany over 600 Years

By Sascha O. Becker and Luigi Pascali

American Economic Review, May 2019

We study the role of economic incentives in shaping the coexistence of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, using novel data from Germany for 1,000+ cities. The Catholic usury ban and higher literacy rates gave Jews a specific advantage in the moneylending...