Improving Educational Quality through Enhancing Community Participation: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment in Indonesia

By Menno Pradhan, Daniel Suryadarma, Amanda Beatty, Maisy Wong, Arya Gaduh, Armida Alisjahbana, and Rima Prama Artha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Education ministries worldwide have promoted community engagement through school committees. This paper presents results from a large field experiment testing alternative approaches to strengthen school committees in public schools in Indonesia. Two no...

How Do Teachers Improve? The Relative Importance of Specific and General Human Capital

By Ben Ost

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

One of the most consistent findings in the literature on teacher quality is that teachers improve with experience, especially in the first several years. This study extends this research by separately identifying the benefits of general teaching experi...

The Demand for Medical Male Circumcision

By Jobiba Chinkhumba, Susan Godlonton, and Rebecca Thornton

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

This paper measures the demand for adult medical male circumcision using an experiment that randomly offered varying-priced subsidies and comprehensive information to 1,600 uncircumcised men in urban Malawi. We find low demand for male circumcision: on...

Do Male-Female Wage Differentials Reflect Differences in the Return to Skill? Cross-City Evidence from 1980-2000

By Paul Beaudry and Ethan Lewis

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Male-female wage gaps declined significantly over the 1980s and 1990s, while returns to education increased. In this paper, we use cross-city data to explore whether, like the return to education, the change in the gender wage gap may reflect changes i...

Testing Paternalism: Cash versus In-Kind Transfers

By Jesse M. Cunha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. This paper tests whether such paternalistically motivated transfers are justified compared to cash, using a randomized controlled trial ...

Human Capital and Productivity in a Team Environment: Evidence from the Healthcare Sector

By Ann P. Bartel, Nancy D. Beaulieu, Ciaran S. Phibbs, and Patricia W. Stone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Using panel data from a large hospital system, this paper presents estimates of the productivity effects of human capital in a team production environment. Proxying nurses' general human capital by education and their unit-specific human capital by expe...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter

By Claudia Goldin

American Economic Review, April 2014

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the "last" chapter c...

Vertical Integration and Input Flows

By Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortaçsu, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, April 2014

We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate firms' ownership of production chains. It does not appear that vertical ownership is primarily used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chai...

Misallocation and Growth

By Boyan Jovanovic

American Economic Review, April 2014

This paper models growth via on-the-job learning when firms and workers are heterogeneous. It is an overlapping generations model in which young agents match with the old. More efficient assignments lead to faster long-run growth, more inequality, and ...

Search, Liquidity, and the Dynamics of House Prices and Construction

By Allen Head, Huw Lloyd-Ellis, and Hongfei Sun

American Economic Review, April 2014

The dynamics of house prices, sales, construction, and population growth in response to city-specific income shocks are characterized for 106 US cities. A dynamic model of search in the housing market in which construction, the entry of buyers, house p...

Spatial Development

By Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, April 2014

We present a theory of spatial development. Manufacturing and services firms located in a continuous geographic area choose each period how much to innovate. Firms trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially. We apply the model t...

The Role of Local Officials in New Democracies: Evidence from Indonesia

By Monica Martinez-Bravo

American Economic Review, April 2014

This paper shows that the body of appointed officials that a new democracy inherits from the previous regime is a key determinant of the extent of electoral fraud and clientelistic spending in new democracies. I develop a model that predicts that appoi...

Bidding for Incomplete Contracts: An Empirical Analysis of Adaptation Costs

By Patrick Bajari, Stephanie Houghton, and Steven Tadelis

American Economic Review, April 2014

Procurement contracts are often renegotiated because of changes that are required after their execution. Using highway paving contracts we show that renegotiation imposes significant adaptation costs. Reduced form regressions suggest that bidders respo...

Do Physicians' Financial Incentives Affect Medical Treatment and Patient Health?

By Jeffrey Clemens and Joshua D. Gottlieb

American Economic Review, April 2014

We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts physician payments, generating are...

Cycles of Conflict: An Economic Model

By Daron Acemoglu and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, April 2014

We propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions. G...

Frictionless Technology Diffusion: The Case of Tractors

By Rodolfo E. Manuelli and Ananth Seshadri

American Economic Review, April 2014

Many new technologies display long adoption lags, and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. We study the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960-a well-known...

Investment Dispersion and the Business Cycle

By Rüdiger Bachmann and Christian Bayer

American Economic Review, April 2014

The cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level investment rates is procyclical. This makes investment rates different from productivity, output, and employment growth, which have countercyclical dispersions. A calibrated heterogeneous-firm business cycle...

Knowledge Is (Less) Power: Experimental Evidence from Residential Energy Use

By Katrina Jessoe and David Rapson

American Economic Review, April 2014

Imperfect information about product attributes inhibits efficiency in many choice settings, but can be overcome by providing simple, lowcost information. We use a randomized control trial to test the effect of high-frequency information about residentia...

Stock Prices, News, and Economic Fluctuations: Comment

By André Kurmann and Elmar Mertens

American Economic Review, April 2014

Beaudry and Portier (2006) propose an identification scheme to study the effects of news shocks about future productivity in vector error correction models (VECMs). This comment shows that, when applied to their VECMs with more than two variables, the ...