What Drives Differences in Management Practices?

By Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, May 2019

Partnering with the US Census Bureau, we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in two waves of 35,000 manufacturing plants in 2010 and 2015. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40 percent of thi...

Wealth Distribution and Social Mobility in the US: A Quantitative Approach

By Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Mi Luo

American Economic Review, May 2019

We quantitatively identify the factors that drive wealth dynamics in the United States and are consistent with its skewed cross-sectional distribution and with social mobility. We concentrate on three critical factors: (i) skewed earnings, (ii) differenti...

Segmented Housing Search

By Monika Piazzesi, Martin Schneider, and Johannes Stroebel

American Economic Review, March 2020

We study housing markets with multiple segments searched by heterogeneous clienteles. In the San Francisco Bay Area, search activity and inventory covary negatively across cities, but positively across market segments within cities. A quantitative search ...

Do Economists Swing for the Fences after Tenure?

By Jonathan Brogaard, Joseph Engelberg, and Edward Van Wesep

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Using a sample of all academics who pass through top 50 economics and finance departments from 1996 through 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure...

High Trade Costs and Their Consequences: An Estimated Dynamic Model of African Agricultural Storage and Trade

By Obie Porteous

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Using a new intranational dataset of monthly grain prices and production and a new approach to identify cost parameters, I estimate and solve a dynamic model of agricultural storage and trade covering all 42 countries of continental sub-Saharan Africa. I ...

The Effects of Income Transparency on Well-Being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Review, April 2020

In 2001, Norwegian tax records became easily accessible online, allowing everyone in the country to observe the incomes of everyone else. According to the income comparisons model, this change in transparency can widen the gap in well-being between richer...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2019

On Latin American Populism, and Its Echoes around the World

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Sebastian Edwards

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In this article, I discuss the ways in which populist experiments have evolved historically. Populists are charismatic leaders who use a fiery rhetoric to pitch the interests of "the people" against those of banks, large firms, multinational companies, ...

What They Were Thinking Then: The Consequences for Macroeconomics during the Past 60 Years

By George A. Akerlof

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

This article explores the development of Keynesian macroeconomics in its early years, and especially in the Big Bang period immediately after the publication of The General Theory. In this period, as standard macroeconomics evolved into the "Ke...

From Cashews to Nudges: The Evolution of Behavioral Economics

By Richard H. Thaler

American Economic Review, June 2018

Coarse Grades: Informing the Public by Withholding Information

By Rick Harbaugh and Eric Rasmusen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

Certifiers of quality often report only coarse grades to the public despite having measured quality more finely, e.g., "Pass" or "Certified" instead of "73 out of 100." Why? We show that coarse grades result in more information being provided to the publi...

Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland

By Marcella Alsan, Owen Garrick, and Grant Graziani

American Economic Review, December 2019

We study the effect of physician workforce diversity on the demand for preventive care among African American men. In an experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors. We use a two-stage design, measu...

Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting: Philadelphia, PA, January 5, 2018

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The Differential Incidence and Severity of Food Insecurity by Racial, Ethnic, and Immigrant Groups over the Great Recession in the United States

By Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Hugo B. Jales, Judith Liu, and Norbert L. Wilson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We document the differences in food insecurity incidence and severity by race/ethnicity and immigrant status over the Great Recession. We show that the disadvantaged groups with a higher incidence of food insecurity do not necessarily have a higher severi...

Retrospectives: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the "Cruel Dilemma"

By Johannes A. Schwarzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

This paper addresses two conflicting views in the 1950s and 1960s about the inflation-unemployment tradeoff as given by the Phillips curve. Many economists at this time emphasized the issue of a seemingly unavoidable inflationary pressure at or even bel...

Do Physicians Respond to the Costs and Cost-Sensitivity of Their Patients?

By Mariana Carrera, Dana P. Goldman, Geoffrey Joyce, and Neeraj Sood

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

We use individual level data on purchases of cholesterol-lowering drugs to study the responses of physicians and patients to variation in the cost of drugs. In a sample of first-time statin prescriptions to employees from 12 Fortune 500 firms, we find tha...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa

By Jonas Hjort and Jonas Poulsen

American Economic Review, March 2019

To show how fast Internet affects employment in Africa, we exploit the gradual arrival of submarine Internet cables on the coast and maps of the terrestrial cable network. Robust difference-in-differences estimates from 3 datasets, covering 12 countries, ...

Prone to Fail: The Pre-crisis Financial System

[Symposium: Financial Stability Regulation]

By Darrell Duffie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The financial crisis that began in 2007 was triggered by over-leveraged homeowners and a severe downturn in US housing markets. However, a reasonably well-supervised financial system would have been much more resilient to this and other types of severe ...

Do Women Give Up Competing More Easily? Evidence from the Lab and the Dutch Math Olympiad

By Thomas Buser and Huaiping Yuan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

We use lab experiments and field data from the Dutch Math Olympiad to show that women are more likely than men to stop competing if they lose. In a math competition in the lab, women are much less likely than men to choose competition again after losing i...