Bound by history

[Research Highlight]

July 24, 2020

Would requiring incumbents to match their previous best vote share improve our democracy?

90th International Atlantic Economic Conference

[News]

August 12, 2020

The conference will be held virtually on October 15-18, 2020.

Can tax policy change gender norms?

[Page]

The earned income tax credit spurred more women to work and changed social attitudes in the process.

Losing Prosociality in the Quest for Talent? Sorting, Selection, and Productivity in the Delivery of Public Services

By Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Edward Davenport, and Scott S. Lee

American Economic Review, May 2020

We embed a field experiment in a nationwide recruitment drive for a new health care position in Zambia to test whether career benefits attract talent at the expense of prosocial motivation. In line with common wisdom, offering career opportunities attract...

The elite-school wage premium

[Page]

How much does going to a prestigious college matter?

Finding the best person for the job

[Research Highlight]

August 13, 2020

Does offering more career advancement attract less motivated workers?

A century of women’s enfranchisement

[Research Highlight]

August 12, 2020

Elizabeth Cascio discusses how generational change has contributed to the expanding political gap between men and women in the US.

ASSA 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting

[Page]

Boosting the youth vote

[Research Highlight]

August 14, 2020

How do states respond when young voters gain more political leverage?

Community policing, WWII economics, and public transit

[News]

July 13, 2020

Reading recommendations from Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Webinar on the Job Market for New Economics Ph.D.s

[Page]

Teaching Replication in the Social Sciences Workshop 2020

[News]

August 26, 2020

The workshop takes place at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research on September 24-25, 2020.

A solution creates a problem

[Page]

An anti-poverty program improved monitoring by going digital and inadvertently reduced access for people it aimed to help.

Market Panics, Frenzies, and Informational Efficiency: Theory and Experiment

By Chad Kendall

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2020

In a market rush, the fear of future adverse price movements causes traders to trade before they become well informed, reducing the informational efficiency of the market. I derive theoretical conditions under which market rushes are equilibrium behavior ...

Processing the rise of quantitative investing

[Page]

Are financial experts shifting away from analyzing company fundamentals?

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2020

An Estimated Structural Model of Entrepreneurial Behavior

By John Bailey Jones and Sangeeta Pratap

American Economic Review, September 2020

Using a rich panel of owner-operated New York dairy farms, we provide new evidence on entrepreneurial behavior. We formulate a dynamic model of farms facing uninsured risks and financial constraints. Farmers derive nonpecuniary benefits from operating the...

Ultimatum Bargaining with Rational Inattention

By Doron Ravid

American Economic Review, September 2020

A seller bargains with a rationally inattentive buyer (Sims 2003) over a good of random quality. After observing quality, the seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer. The buyer pays attention to the seller's product and offer at a cost proportional to ex...

Rich Pickings? Risk, Return, and Skill in Household Wealth

By Laurent Bach, Laurent E. Calvet, and Paolo Sodini

American Economic Review, September 2020

We investigate wealth returns on an administrative panel containing the disaggregated balance sheets of Swedish residents. The expected return on household net wealth is strongly persistent, determined primarily by systematic risk, and increasing in net w...

Self-Fulfilling Debt Dilution: Maturity and Multiplicity in Debt Models

By Mark Aguiar and Manuel Amador

American Economic Review, September 2020

We establish that creditor beliefs regarding future borrowing can be self-fulfilling, leading to multiple equilibria with markedly different debt accumulation patterns. We characterize such indeterminacy in the Eaton-Gersovitz sovereign debt model augment...