Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes

By Arindrajit Dube

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

There is robust evidence that higher minimum wages increase family incomes at the bottom of the distribution. The long-run (3 or more years) minimum wage elasticity of the non-elderly poverty rate with respect to the minimum wage ranges between −0.220 a...

Parag Pathak: Winner of the 2018 Clark Medal

By Ariel Pakes and Joel Sobel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The American Economic Association awarded Parag Pathak the 2018 John Bates Clark Medal for his research on the impacts of educational policies. Both the theory and the empirical research take the constraints facing administrators seriously. As a result,...

The Consequences of Treating Electricity as a Right

[Symposium: Electricity in Developing Countries]

By Robin Burgess, Michael Greenstone, Nicholas Ryan, and Anant Sudarshan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

This paper seeks to explain why billions of people in developing countries either have no access to electricity or lack a reliable supply. We present evidence that these shortfalls are a consequence of electricity being treated as a right and that this ...

Endogenous Disasters

By Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, Lu Zhang, and Lars-Alexander Kuehn

American Economic Review, August 2018

Market economies are intrinsically unstable. The standard search model of equilibrium unemployment, once solved accurately with a globally nonlinear algorithm, gives rise endogenously to rare disasters. Intuitively, in the presence of cumulatively large n...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

Bid Shading and Bidder Surplus in the US Treasury Auction System

By Ali Hortaçsu, Jakub Kastl, and Allen Zhang

American Economic Review, January 2018

We analyze bidding data from uniform price auctions of US Treasury bills and notes between July 2009 and October 2013. Primary dealers consistently bid higher yields compared to direct and indirect bidders. We estimate a structural model of bidding that t...

Risk Preference: A View from Psychology

[Symposium: Risk in Economics and Psychology]

By Rui Mata, Renato Frey, David Richter, Jürgen Schupp, and Ralph Hertwig

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

Psychology offers conceptual and analytic tools that can advance the discussion on the nature of risk preference and its measurement in the behavioral sciences. We discuss the revealed and stated preference measurement traditions, which have coexisted...

Speed, Accuracy, and the Optimal Timing of Choices

By Drew Fudenberg, Philipp Strack, and Tomasz Strzalecki

American Economic Review, December 2018

We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary decisions as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant cost per unit time f...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, November 2019

Neighborhood Sanitation and Infant Mortality

By Michael Geruso and Dean Spears

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

In this paper, we shed new light on a long-standing puzzle: in India, Muslim children are substantially more likely than Hindu children to survive to their first birthday, even though Indian Muslims have lower wealth, consumption, educational attainment, ...

Constrained Efficiency in a Human Capital Model

By Yena Park

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

This paper investigates whether capital and human capital are over-accumulated in an incomplete market economy. As in Davila et al. (2012), whether capital is over-accumulated depends on how the pecuniary externalities affect insurance and redistribution....

The Cost of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Kenneth Gillingham and James H. Stock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

Most countries, including the United States, have an array of greenhouse gas mitigation policies, which provide subsidies or restrictions typically aimed at specific technologies or sectors. Such climate policies range from automobile fuel economy stand...

The Role of Annuitized Wealth in Post-retirement Behavior

By John Laitner, Dan Silverman, and Dmitriy Stolyarov

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

This paper develops a tractable model of post-retirement behavior with health status uncertainty and state-verification difficulties. The model distinguishes between annuitized and non-annuitized wealth and features means-tested Medicaid assistance with n...

What We Have Learned about Terrorism since 9/11

By Khusrav Gaibulloev and Todd Sandler

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

This overview examines critically the post-9/11 empirical literature on terrorism. Major contributions by both economists and political scientists are included. We focus on five main themes: the changing nature of terrorism, the organization of terroris...

Un-Fortunate Sons: Effects of the Vietnam Draft Lottery on the Next Generation's Labor Market

By Sarena Goodman and Adam Isen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We examine whether the considerable shock generated by the Vietnam draft lottery affected the next generation's labor market. Using the universe of US federal tax returns, we link fathers from draft cohorts to their sons' adult outcomes and find that sons...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2018

Do Job Destruction Shocks Matter in the Theory of Unemployment?

By Melvyn G. Coles and Ali Moghaddasi Kelishomi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Because the data show that market tightness is not orthogonal to unemployment, this paper identifies the many empirical difficulties caused by adopting the free entry of vacancies assumption in the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) framework. Relaxing th...

On DSGE Models

[Symposium: Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession]

By Lawrence J. Christiano, Martin S. Eichenbaum, and Mathias Trabandt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

The outcome of any important macroeconomic policy change is the net effect of forces operating on different parts of the economy. A central challenge facing policymakers is how to assess the relative strength of those forces. Economists have a range of to...

The Fall of Coal: Joint Impacts of Fuel Prices and Renewables on Generation and Emissions

By Harrison Fell and Daniel T. Kaffine

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

Since 2007, US coal-fired electricity generation has declined by a stunning 25 percent. Detailed daily unit-level data is used to examine the joint impact of natural gas prices and wind generation on coal-fired generation and emissions, with a focus on th...

Women in Economics: Stalled Progress

[Symposium: Women in Economics]

By Shelly Lundberg and Jenna Stearns

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Women are still a minority in the economics profession. By the mid-2000s, just under 35 percent of PhD students and 30 percent of assistant professors were female, and these numbers have remained roughly constant ever since. Over the past two decades, w...