Childhood Circumstances and Adult Outcomes: Act II

By Douglas Almond, Janet Currie, and Valentina Duque

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

That prenatal events can have life-long consequences is now well established. Nevertheless, research on the fetal origins hypothesis is flourishing and has expanded to include the early childhood (postnatal) environment. Why does this literature have a ...

Emi Nakamura: 2019 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Janice Eberly and Michael Woodford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

Emi Nakamura is the 2019 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. Emi is an empirical macroeconomist whose work has studied the nature of price-setting and the effects of monetary and fiscal policies, among other iss...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

What Do Trade Agreements Really Do?

[Symposium: Does the US Really Gain From Trade?]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

Economists have a tendency to associate "free trade agreements" all too closely with "free trade." They may be unaware of some of the new (and often problematic) beyond-the-border features of current trade agreements. As trade agreements have evolved ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Devesh Kapur

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The Indian state's performance spans the spectrum from woefully inadequate, especially in core public goods provision, to surprisingly impressive in successfully managing complex tasks and on a massive scale. It has delivered better on macroeconomic rat...

Report of Independent Auditor

American Economic Review, June 2019

Early School Exposure, Test Scores, and Noncognitive Outcomes

By Thomas Cornelissen and Christian Dustmann

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

We estimate the effects of receiving additional schooling before age five on cognitive and noncognitive outcomes, exploiting unique school entry rules in England that cause variation in the age at school entry and the effective length of the first school ...

The Great Indian Demonetization

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Amartya Lahiri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

On November 8, 2016, India demonetized 86 percent of its currency in circulation. The stated objectives of the move were to seize undeclared income, to destroy counterfeit currency, to speed up formalization of the economy, and to increase the tax base. I...

Solo Self-Employment and Alternative Work Arrangements: A Cross-Country Perspective on the Changing Composition of Jobs

By Tito Boeri, Giulia Giupponi, Alan B. Krueger, and Stephen Machin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work and alternative work arrangements....

Asylum Migration to the Developed World: Persecution, Incentives, and Policy

[Symposium: Assimilation of Refugees]

By Timothy J. Hatton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The European migration crisis of 2015-2016 and the migrants from Central America gathering on the US border since 2017 have created headlines and presented challenges for Western governments. In this paper, I examine the trends in, and determinants of, th...

The Economics of Maps

By Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long ...

The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire

By Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Review, April 2018

We document substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output, and peasants' nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before the emancipation, provinces where serfs constituted the majority of agric...

Does Regulatory Jurisdiction Affect the Quality of Investment-Adviser Regulation?

By Ben Charoenwong, Alan Kwan, and Tarik Umar

American Economic Review, October 2019

The Dodd-Frank Act shifted regulatory jurisdiction over "midsize" investment advisers from the SEC to state-securities regulators. Client complaints against midsize advisers increased relative to those continuing under SEC oversight by 30 to 40 percent of...

Are Credit Markets Still Local? Evidence from Bank Branch Closings

By Hoai-Luu Q. Nguyen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

This paper studies whether distance shapes credit allocation by estimating the impact of bank branch closings during the 2000s on local access to credit. To generate plausibly exogenous variation in the incidence of closings, I use an instrument based on ...

Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?

By Heather Antecol, Kelly Bedard, and Jenna Stearns

American Economic Review, September 2018

Many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment. Examples include law firm associates, surgical residents, and untenured faculty at research-intensive universities. High...

Dynamism with Incommensurate Development: The Distinctive Indian Model

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Rohit Lamba and Arvind Subramanian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

India's sequencing of economic and political development has been unusual. In contrast to the West and more recently East Asia, democratization has preceded economic growth. Notwithstanding its unique path, India has grown substantially over the last fo...

Review of Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century's thesis is that violence and only violence significantly reduces inequality. It shows supportive cases of violence reducing inequality, es...

Multiple Lenders, Strategic Default, and Covenants

By Andrea Attar, Catherine Casamatta, Arnold Chassagnon, and Jean-Paul Décamps

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

We study capital markets in which investors compete by designing financial contracts to control an entrepreneur's ability to side trade and default on multiple loans. We show that covenants may have anticompetitive effects: in particular, they prevent inv...

Financial Incentives as Signals: Experimental Evidence from the Recruitment of Village Promoters in Uganda

By Erika Deserranno

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

I study the role of financial incentives as signals of job characteristics when these are unknown to potential applicants. To this end, I create experimental variation in expected earnings and use that to estimate the effect of financial incentives on c...