JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

Teaching the Tax Code: Earnings Responses to an Experiment with EITC Recipients

By Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We conducted a randomized experiment with 43,000 EITC recipients at H&R Block. Tax preparers gave simple, personalized information about the EITC schedule to half of their clients. We find no significant effects of information provision on earnings in the...

The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior

By Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

This paper explores the importance of the home and school environments in explaining the gender gap in disruptive behavior. We document large differences in the gender gap across key features of the home environment -- boys do especially poorly in broke...

Real Wage Inequality

By Enrico Moretti

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

While nominal wage differences between skilled and unskilled workers have increased since 1980, college graduates have experienced larger increases in cost of living because they have increasingly concentrated in cities with high cost of housing. Using...

Barriers to Household Risk Management: Evidence from India

By Shawn Cole, Xavier Giné, Jeremy Tobacman, Petia Topalova, Robert Townsend, and James Vickery

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of nonsystematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and nonprice factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall...

Back on the Rails: Competition and Productivity in State-Owned Industry

By Sanghamitra Das, Kala Krishna, Sergey Lychagin, and Rohini Somanathan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We use a proprietary dataset on the floor-level operations at the largest rail mill in India to study the response of productivity to the threat of entry. Output per active shift increased by 28 percent over 3 years with minimal changes in physical cap...

Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya

By Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries? To shed light on this question, we randomized access to noninterest-bearing bank accounts among two types of self-employed individuals in rural Kenya: market vendors...

Cognitive Abilities and Household Financial Decision Making

By Sumit Agarwal and Bhashkar Mazumder

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example features the optimal use of credit cards for convenience transactions after a balance transfer and t...

Do Oil Windfalls Improve Living Standards? Evidence from Brazil

By Francesco Caselli and Guy Michaels

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls on government behavior. Oil-rich municipalities experience increases in revenues and report corresponding increases in spending on public goo...

Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal in the United States

By William J. Collins and Katharine L. Shester

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We study the local effects of a federal program that helped cities clear areas for redevelopment, rehabilitate structures, complete city plans, and enforce building codes. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the program's effects on ci...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Marginal Jobs, Heterogeneous Firms, and Unemployment Flows

By Michael W. L. Elsby and Ryan Michaels

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

This paper introduces a notion of firm size into a search and matching model with endogenous job destruction. The outcome is a rich, yet analytically tractable framework that can be used to analyze a broad set of features of both the cross-section and ...

Oil and Conflict: What Does the Cross Country Evidence Really Show?

By Anca M. Cotet and Kevin K. Tsui

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

This paper re-examines the effect of oil wealth on political violence. Using a unique historical panel dataset of oil discoveries, we show that simply controlling for country fixed effects removes the statistical association between the value of oil re...

Identifying the Effects of Bank Failures from a Natural Experiment in Mississippi during the Great Depression

By Nicolas L. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

I examine the causal effect of bank failures during the Great Depression using the quasi-experimental setup of Richardson and Troost (2009). The experiment is based on Mississippi being divided into two Federal Reserve districts, which followed differe...

Hedging against the Government: A Solution to the Home Asset Bias Puzzle

By Tiago C. Berriel and Saroj Bhattarai

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

We explain why international nominal bonds and equity portfolios are biased domestically. In our model, holding domestic government nominal debt provides a hedge against shocks to bond returns and the impact on taxes they induce. For this result, only ...

On the Real Effects of Bank Bailouts: Micro Evidence from Japan

By Mariassunta Giannetti and Andrei Simonov

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Exploiting the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s as a laboratory, we investigate the effects of bank bailouts on the supply of credit and the performance of banks' clients. Our findings indicate that the size of capital injections relative to the in...

Taxes and Time Use: Fiscal Policy in a Household Production Model

By Kelly S. Ragan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Time use data on work and leisure is presented for a broad group of OECD countries. The home production model explicitly accounts for taxes and public expenditures on day care and elder care, substitutes for work households perform at home. Taxes are im...