Legal Realism for Economists

By Matthew C. Stephenson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Economists have made great progress in understanding the incentives and behavior of actors who operate outside of traditional economic markets, including voters, legislators, and bureaucrats. The incentives and behavior of judges, however, remain largely ...

Distributional Effects of Globalization in Developing Countries

By Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg and Nina Pavcnik

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2007

The authors discuss recent empirical research on how globalization has affected income inequality in developing countries. They begin with a discussion of conceptual issues regarding the measurement of globalization and inequality. Next, they present e...

Changing Household Financial Opportunities and Economic Security

[Symposium: Household Risks]

By Karen E. Dynan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

Households have experienced an expansion of financial opportunities over the past several decades. Expanded financial opportunities, such as the democratization of credit and new lending approaches, can yield benefits in terms of household economic securi...

Long-Term Consequences of Vietnam-Era Conscription: New Estimates Using Social Security Data

By Joshua D. Angrist, Stacey H. Chen, and Jae Song

American Economic Review, May 2011

We use the draft lottery to construct instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the impact of Vietnam-era military service on veterans' Social Security (SSA) earnings through 2007. We also use SSA data to construct IV estimates for employment (as measured ...

Estimating Average and Local Average Treatment Effects of Education when Compulsory Schooling Laws Really Matter

By Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Review, March 2006

The change to the minimum school-leaving age in the United Kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14-year-olds in the mid-twentieth century to stay in school for one more year. The magnitude...

Globalization and Growth

By Gene M. Grossman and Elhanan Helpman

American Economic Review, May 2015

How does globalization affect economic growth? We discuss mechanisms that link international integration to the incentives for knowledge accumulation and the efficacy of that process. First, integration facilitates the flow of knowledge across national bo...

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment

By David Neumark and William Wascher

American Economic Review, December 2000

Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia

By Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Review, December 2011

This paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only national TV channel independent from the government. It was available to three-quarters of Russia's population a...

Targeting with Agents

By Paul Niehaus, Antonia Atanassova, Marianne Bertrand, and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

Targeting assistance to the poor is a central problem in development. We study the problem of designing a proxy means test when the implementing agent is corruptible. Conditioning on more poverty indicators may worsen targeting in this environment beca...

Trying to Explain Home Bias in Equities and Consumption

By Karen K. Lewis

Journal of Economic Literature, June 1999

Investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest, a phenomenon called "equity home bias." In the absence of this bias, investors would optimally diversify domestic ...

Dynamic Free Riding with Irreversible Investments

By Marco Battaglini, Salvatore Nunnari, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Review, September 2014

We study the Markov equilibria of a model of free riding in which n infinitely lived agents choose between private consumption and irreversible contributions to a durable public good. We show that the set of equilibrium steady states converges to a unique...

Time-Varying Effects of Oil Supply Shocks on the US Economy

By Christiane Baumeister and Gert Peersman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2013

Using time-varying BVARs, we find a substantial decline in the shortrun price elasticity of oil demand since the mid-1980s. This finding helps explain why an oil production shortfall of the same magnitude is associated with a stronger response of oil p...

Crime, Inequality, and Unemployment

By Kenneth Burdett, Ricardo Lagos, and Randall Wright

American Economic Review, December 2003

Height, Health, and Cognitive Function at Older Ages

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2008

Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden

By Timothy Besley, Olle Folke, Torsten Persson, and Johanna Rickne

American Economic Review, August 2017

We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in S...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

Do Firm Boundaries Matter?

By Sendhil Mullainathan and David Scharfstein

American Economic Review, May 2001

Unequal Treatment of Identical Agents in Cournot Equilibrium

By Stephen W. Salant and Greg Shaffer

American Economic Review, June 1999

Oligopoly models where prior actions by firms affect subsequent marginal costs have been useful in illuminating policy debates in areas such as antitrust regulation, environmental protection, and international competition. The authors discuss properties o...

Fertility and the Plough

By Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper provides evidence that the form of agriculture traditionally practiced—intensive plough agriculture versus shifting hoe agriculture—affected historic norms and preferences about fertility, and that these norms persist, affecting obs...

Learn English, Not the Local Language! Ethnic Russians in the Baltic States

By Ott Toomet

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper analyzes the return to dominant language fluency for ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. We look at male workers using Estonian Labor Force Survey for years 2000-2010 and the 1998 wave of a panel of high-school graduates of 1982. The results ...