Designing Deadlines

By Erik Madsen

American Economic Review, March 2022

I study how an organization should manage a project of uncertain scope, when it is advised by a privately informed expert who prefers to prolong his employment. The optimal long-term contract combines a deadline for project completion and incentive paymen...

Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field

By Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth

American Economic Review, March 2022

Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneur...

Misspecified Politics and the Recurrence of Populism

By Gilat Levy, Ronny Razin, and Alwyn Young

American Economic Review, March 2022

We develop a dynamic model of political competition between two groups that differ in their subjective model of the data generating process for a common outcome. One group has a simpler model than the other group as they ignore some relevant policy variab...

Basic income and welfare traps

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Can replacing unemployment benefits with a basic income boost employment?

ASSA 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting

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ASSA 2022 Virtual Annual Meeting

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Moving on up?

[Research Highlight]

February 18, 2022

Ellora Derenoncourt discusses how economic prospects declined for the generations of African Americans that followed the Great Migration.

2020 Elaine Bennett Research Prize Presentation:

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2020 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award Presentation:

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2021 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award Presentation:

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Market failures vs. regulatory shortcomings

[Research Highlight]

March 02, 2022

Market-based reforms from 1999 to 2012 significantly decreased the costs of producing electricity in the United States.

Imperfect Markets versus Imperfect Regulation in US Electricity Generation

By Steve Cicala

American Economic Review, February 2022

This paper evaluates changes in electricity generation costs caused by the introduction of market mechanisms to determine production in the United States. I use the staggered transition to markets from 1999 to 2012 to estimate the causal impact of liberal...

Religion and Discrimination: A Review Essay of Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom

By Sriya Iyer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama's book, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom, examines the links between religion, state action, and the development of liberalism in medieval Europe. It discusses a model of "conditiona...

A Review of Robert Sugden's Community of Advantage

By Patrick Harless and Romans Pancs

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

In his book, The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist's Defence of the Market, Robert Sugden says that people should be left alone to do what they want. We interpret his reasons for saying so and try to unify them. The unification uses...

Looking Back at 50 Years of the Clean Air Act

By Joseph E. Aldy, Maximilian Auffhammer, Maureen Cropper, Arthur Fraas, and Richard Morgenstern

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

We synthesize and review retrospective analyses of federal air quality regulations to examine the contributions of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to the vast air quality improvements seen since 1970. Geographic heterogeneity in stringency affects emissions, publ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

The increasing quality of job matching

[Research Highlight]

March 03, 2022

Better job screening is decreasing the rate of worker turnover.