The Changing Role of Government in Financing Health Care: An International Perspective

By Mark Stabile and Sarah Thomson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to elucidate the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, ...

The Return of "Patrimonial Capitalism": A Review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

By Branko Milanovic

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty provides a unified theory of the functioning of the capitalist economy by linking theories of economic growth and functional and personal income distributions. It argues, based on the long-run h...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

Dynamic Adverse Selection: A Theory of Illiquidity, Fire Sales, and Flight to Quality

By Veronica Guerrieri and Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, July 2014

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of asset markets with adverse selection. There exists a unique equilibrium in which better quality assets trade at higher prices but with a lower price-dividend ratio in less liquid markets. Sellers of high-quality a...

Micro-loans, Insecticide-Treated Bednets, and Malaria: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Orissa, India

By Alessandro Tarozzi, Aprajit Mahajan, Brian Blackburn, Dan Kopf, Lakshmi Krishnan, and Joanne Yoong

American Economic Review, July 2014

We describe findings from the first large-scale cluster randomized controlled trial in a developing country that evaluates the uptake of a health-protecting technology, insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs), through micro-consumer loans, as compared to free ...

Importers, Exporters, and Exchange Rate Disconnect

By Mary Amiti, Oleg Itskhoki, and Jozef Konings

American Economic Review, July 2014

Large exporters are simultaneously large importers. We show that this pattern is key to understanding low aggregate exchange rate pass-through as well as the variation in pass-through across exporters. We develop a theoretical framework with variable mark...

Patent Laws, Product Life-Cycle Lengths, and Multinational Activity

By L. Kamran Bilir

American Economic Review, July 2014

Do intellectual property rights influence multinationals' manufacturing location decisions? My theoretical model indicates that countries with strong patent laws attract multinational activity, but only in sectors with relatively long product life cycles....

Auctions, Actions, and the Failure of Information Aggregation

By Alp E. Atakan and Mehmet Ekmekci

American Economic Review, July 2014

We study a uniform-price auction where k identical common-value objects are allocated amongst z > k bidders who have imperfect signals about the state of the world. The common valuation is determined jointly by the state and an action that is chosen after...

Peer Effects in Program Participation

By Gordon B. Dahl, Katrine V. Løken, and Magne Mogstad

American Economic Review, July 2014

We estimate peer effects in paid paternity leave in Norway using a regression discontinuity design. Coworkers and brothers are 11 and 15 percentage points, respectively, more likely to take paternity leave if their peer was exogenously induced to take up ...

Consumption and Labor Supply with Partial Insurance: An Analytical Framework

By Jonathan Heathcote, Kjetil Storesletten, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, July 2014

We develop a model with partial insurance against idiosyncratic wage shocks to quantify risk sharing. Closed-form solutions are obtained for equilibrium allocations and for moments of the joint distribution of consumption, hours, and wages. We prove ident...

A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade

By Roc Armenter and Miklós Koren

American Economic Review, July 2014

Many of the facts about the extensive margin of trade—which firms export, and how many products are sent to how many destinations—are consistent with a surprisingly large class of trade models because of the sparse nature of trade data. We pro...

The Effect of Patient Cost Sharing on Utilization, Health, and Risk Protection

By Hitoshi Shigeoka

American Economic Review, July 2014

This paper exploits a sharp reduction in patient cost sharing at age 70 in Japan, using a regression discontinuity design to examine its effect on utilization, health, and financial risk arising from out-of-pocket expenditures. Due to the national policy,...

Mafia and Public Spending: Evidence on the Fiscal Multiplier from a Quasi-experiment

By Antonio Acconcia, Giancarlo Corsetti, and Saverio Simonelli

American Economic Review, July 2014

A law issued to combat political corruption and Mafia infiltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output mul...

Household Bargaining and Excess Fertility: An Experimental Study in Zambia

By Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, and Jean Lee

American Economic Review, July 2014

We posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard since most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone...

E-lections: Voting Behavior and the Internet

By Oliver Falck, Robert Gold, and Stephan Heblich

American Economic Review, July 2014

This paper analyzes the effects on voting behavior of information disseminated over the Internet. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hinder...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2014

Persistence of Fortune: Accounting for Population Movements, There Was No Post-Columbian Reversal

By Areendam Chanda, C. Justin Cook, and Louis Putterman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

Using data on place of origin of today's country populations and the indicators of level of development in 1500 used by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2002), we confirm a reversal of fortune for colonized countries as territories, but find persistence o...