Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession 2011

By Barbara M. Fraumeni

American Economic Review, May 2012

Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession: Report of Committee Activities for the 2011 Calendar Year

By Marie T. Mora

American Economic Review, May 2012

American Economic Association Committee on Statistics (AEAStat): Annual Report--2011

By Robert Feenstra

American Economic Review, May 2012

Report of the Committee on Government Relations

By Charles Schultze

American Economic Review, May 2012

The American Economic Association and Allied Social Science Associations

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2012

Report of the Selection Committee for the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics Editor

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, May 2012

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2012

Includes: "Alan S. Blinder: Distinguished Fellow 2011"

Statistical Modeling of Monetary Policy and Its Effects

By Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Review, June 2012

Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, and Julia Tobias

American Economic Review, June 2012

This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hy...

Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School

By Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, and Stephen P. Ryan

American Economic Review, June 2012

We use a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning in India. In treatment schools, teachers' attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their sa...

Selective Trials: A Principal-Agent Approach to Randomized Controlled Experiments

By Sylvain Chassang, Gerard Padró I Miquel, and Erik Snowberg

American Economic Review, June 2012

We study the design of randomized controlled experiments when outcomes are significantly affected by experimental subjects' unobserved effort expenditure. While standard randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are internally consistent, the unobservability o...

Ethnicity and Conflict: An Empirical Study

By Joan Esteban, Laura Mayoral, and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, June 2012

We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenb...

Information, Animal Spirits, and the Meaning of Innovations in Consumer Confidence

By Robert B. Barsky and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Review, June 2012

Innovations to consumer confidence convey incremental information about economic activity far into the future. Does this reflect a causal effect of animal spirits on economic activity, or news about exogenous future productivity received by consumers? Usi...

Why Does Trend Growth Affect Equilibrium Employment? A New Explanation of an Old Puzzle

By Michael W. L. Elsby and Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, June 2012

That the employment rate appears to respond to changes in trend growth is an enduring macroeconomic puzzle. This paper shows that, in the presence of a return to experience, a slowdown in productivity growth raises reservation wages, thereby lowering aggr...

Understanding Bank Runs: The Importance of Depositor-Bank Relationships and Networks

By Rajkamal Iyer and Manju Puri

American Economic Review, June 2012

We use unique depositor-level data for a bank that faced a run to understand the factors that affect depositor behavior. We find uninsured depositors are most likely to run. Deposit insurance helps, but is only partially effective. Bank-depositor relation...

Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions, and Clubs

By Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov, and Konstantin Sonin

American Economic Review, June 2012

In dynamic collective decision making, current decisions determine the future distribution of political power and influence future decisions. We develop a general framework to study this class of problems. Under acyclicity, we characterize dynamically sta...

The Enduring Impact of the American Dust Bowl: Short- and Long-Run Adjustments to Environmental Catastrophe

By Richard Hornbeck

American Economic Review, June 2012

The 1930s American Dust Bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the Plains. The Dust Bowl is estimated to have immediately, substantially, and persistently reduced agricultural land values and revenues in more-eroded counties...

The Origins of Ethnolinguistic Diversity

By Stelios Michalopoulos

American Economic Review, June 2012

This study explores the determinants of ethnolinguistic diversity within as well as across countries, shedding light on its geographic origins. The empirical analysis conducted across countries, virtual countries, and pairs of contiguous regions establish...

Competitive Pressure and the Adoption of Complementary Innovations

By Tobias Kretschmer, Eugenio J. Miravete, and José C. Pernías

American Economic Review, June 2012

Liberalization of the European automobile distribution system in 2002 limits the ability of manufacturers to impose vertical restraints, leading to a substantial increase in competitive pressure among dealers. We estimate an equilibrium model of profit ...

Evaluating Microfoundations for Aggregate Price Rigidities: Evidence from Matched Firm-Level Data on Product Prices and Unit Labor Cost

By Mikael Carlsson and Oskar Nordström Skans

American Economic Review, June 2012

Using matched data on product-level prices and the producing firm's unit labor cost, we find a moderate pass-through of current idiosyncratic marginal-cost changes. Also, the response does not vary across firms facing very different idiosyncratic shock v...