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 ...

Tax Policy and Aggregate Demand Management under Catching Up with the Joneses

By Lars Ljungqvist and Harald Uhlig

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity-shock driven economies with catching-up-with-the-Joneses utility functions. The optimal tax policy is shown to affect the economy countercyclically via procyclical taxes, i.e., "cooling down" t...

The Caring Hand that Cripples: The East German Labor Market after Reunification

By Dennis J. Snower and Christian Merkl

American Economic Review, May 2006

Optimal Tariffs and Market Power: The Evidence

By Christian Broda, Nuno Limao, and David E. Weinstein

American Economic Review, December 2008

We find that prior to World Trade Organization membership, countries set import tariffs 9 percentage points higher on inelastically supplied imports relative to those supplied elastically. The magnitude of this effect is similar to the size of average ...

The Fiscal Cost of Hurricanes: Disaster Aid versus Social Insurance

By Tatyana Deryugina

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Little is known about the fiscal costs of natural disasters, especially regarding social safety nets that do not specifically target extreme weather events. This paper shows that US hurricanes lead to substantial increases in non-disaster government trans...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

Bankruptcy as Implicit Health Insurance

By Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, February 2015

This paper examines the implicit health insurance that households receive from the ability to declare bankruptcy. Exploiting multiple sources of variation in asset exemption law, I show that uninsured households with a greater financial cost of bankrup...

The Productivity of Physician Specialization: Evidence from the Medicare Program

By Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra

American Economic Review, May 2004

The Size Distribution of Farms and International Productivity Differences

By Tasso Adamopoulos and Diego Restuccia

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the determinants of differences in farm-size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity using a quantitative sectoral model featuring a distribution of farms. Measured aggregate factors (capital, land, economy-w...

Producing Organ Donors

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By David H. Howard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Organ transplantation is one of the greatest technological achievements of modern medicine, but the ability of patients to benefit from transplantation is limited by shortages of transplantable organs. The median waiting time for patients placed on the ki...

Economics of Alliances: The Lessons for Collective Action

By Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

This essay provides an up-to-date summary of the findings of the literature on the economics of alliances. We show that the study of the economics of alliances has played a pivotal role in understanding and applying public good analysis to real-world appl...

Measuring Vote-Selling: Field Evidence from the Philippines

By Allen Hicken, Stephen Leider, Nico Ravanilla, and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using data from an anti-vote-buying field experiment we conducted in the Philippines, we report and validate a proxy measure for vote-selling. We demonstrate that our proxy measure, vote-switching, changes as expected with voter preferences and monetary o...

Economic Reforms in India Since 1991: Has Gradualism Worked?

[Symposium: India]

By Montek S. Ahluwalia

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Opinions on the causes of India's growth deceleration vary. World economic growth was slower in the second half of the 1990s, and that would have had some dampening effect, but India's dependence on the world economy is not large enough for this to accoun...

Accounting for the Growth of MNC-Based Trade Using a Structural Model of U.S. MNCs

By Susan E. Feinberg and Michael P. Keane

American Economic Review, December 2006

In recent decades, U.S. foreign trade grew much faster than GDP, but there is no consensus why. Notably lacking is an understanding of the role of multinational corporations (MNCs), which mediate over half of world trade. We use Bureau of Economic Anal...

More Haste, Less Speed? Signaling through Investment Timing

By Catherine Bobtcheff and Raphaël Levy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2017

We consider a cash-constrained firm learning on the value of an irreversible project at a privately known speed. Under perfect information, the optimal date of investment may be non-monotonic in the learning speed: better learning increases the value of e...

Amplification Mechanisms in Liquidity Crises

By Arvind Krishnamurthy

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

I describe two amplifications mechanisms that operate during crises and discuss the benefits of policy given each mechanism. The first mechanism involves asset prices and balance sheets. A negative shock to agents' balance sheets causes them to liquidate...

The Returns to Microenterprise Support among the Ultrapoor: A Field Experiment in Postwar Uganda

By Christopher Blattman, Eric P. Green, Julian Jamison, M. Christian Lehmann, and Jeannie Annan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

We show that extremely poor, war-affected women in northern Uganda have high returns to a package of $150 cash, five days of business skills training, and ongoing supervision. Sixteen months after grants, participants doubled their microenterprise ownersh...