Gary Becker as Teacher

By Kevin M. Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper looks at the work of Gary S. Becker, American economist, professor of sociology, friend, and colleague of Kevin M. Murphy. Murphy discusses the traditional approach of Becker's teaching and ideas as they were expressed through his wealth of con...

Gary Becker: Model Economic Scientist

By James J. Heckman

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper presents Gary Becker's approach to conducting creative, empirically fruitful economic research. It describes the traits and methodology that made him such a productive and influential scholar.

Gary Becker's Impact on Economics and Policy

By Edward P. Lazear

American Economic Review, May 2015

Gary Becker was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. He advanced social science by introducing economic thinking into areas that were thought to be off limits. Because his theory was motivated by his desire to explain the world, his analyses ...

Human Capital and Growth

By Robert E. Lucas Jr.

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper describes a growth model with the property that human capital accumulation can account for all observed growth. The model is shown to be consistent with evidence on individual productivities as measured by census earnings data. The central hypo...

Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth

By Paul M. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2015

Mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in the languages of words as opposed t...

Lessons from Schumpeterian Growth Theory

By Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, and Peter Howitt

American Economic Review, May 2015

By operationalizing the notion of creative destruction, Schumpeterian growth theory generates distinctive predictions on important microeconomic aspects of the growth process (competition, firm dynamics, firm size distribution, cross-firm and cross-sector...

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...

Messaging and the Mandate: The Impact of Consumer Experience on Health Insurance Enrollment through Exchanges

By Natalie Cox, Benjamin Handel, Jonathan Kolstad, and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, May 2015

The ability of web-based retailers to learn about and provide targeted consumer experiences is touted as an important distinction from traditional retailers. In principal, web-based insurance exchanges could benefit from these advantages. Using data from ...

Narrow Networks on the Health Insurance Exchanges: What Do They Look Like and How Do They Affect Pricing? A Case Study of Texas

By Leemore Dafny, Igal Hendel, and Nathan Wilson

American Economic Review, May 2015

The Affordable Care Act has engendered significant changes in the design of health insurance products. We examine the "narrowness" of hospital networks affiliated with plans offered in the first year of the marketplaces. Using data from Texas, we find lim...

Measuring Consumer Valuation of Limited Provider Networks

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Amanda Starc

American Economic Review, May 2015

We measure the breadth of insurance networks in the Massachusetts health insurance exchange. Using our measures, we estimate consumer willingness-to-pay for broad and narrow networks. We find that consumers have a wide range of plans available with dramat...

The Impact of Market Size and Composition on Health Insurance Premiums: Evidence from the First Year of the Affordable Care Act

By Michael J. Dickstein, Mark Duggan, Joe Orsini, and Pietro Tebaldi

American Economic Review, May 2015

Under the Affordable Care Act, individual states have discretion in how they define coverage regions, within which insurers must charge the same premium to buyers of the same age, family structure, and smoking status. We exploit variation in these definit...

The Effect of Unemployment Benefits on the Duration of Unemployment Insurance Receipt: New Evidence from a Regression Kink Design in Missouri, 2003-2013

By David Card, Andrew Johnston, Pauline Leung, Alexandre Mas, and Zhuan Pei

American Economic Review, May 2015

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression k...

Veterans' Labor Force Participation: What Role Does the VA's Disability Compensation Program Play?

By Courtney Coile, Mark Duggan, and Audrey Guo

American Economic Review, May 2015

We explore time trends in the labor force participation of veterans and non-veterans and investigate whether they are consistent with a rising role for the Department of Veterans Affairs' Disability Compensation (DC) program, which pays benefits to vetera...

Earnings, Disposable Income, and Consumption of Allowed and Rejected Disability Insurance Applicants

By Andreas Ravndal Kostøl and Magne Mogstad

American Economic Review, May 2015

Two key questions in thinking about the size and growth of the disability insurance program are to what extent it discourages work, and how valuable the insurance is to individuals and families. These questions motivate our paper. We begin by describing t...

Recall Expectations and Duration Dependence

By Arash Nekoei and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using novel administrative data from Austria, we investigate the nature of temporary layoffs and recalls. We find that on average jobs ending in temporary layoffs lasted shorter but paid higher wages. The majority of temporarily laid-off workers return to...

The Great Recession and Credit Trends across Income Groups

By Gene Amromin and Leslie McGranahan

American Economic Review, May 2015

In this paper, we document trends in credit use across income groups in the period surrounding the Great Recession. We investigate trends in access to different credit markets, including mortgages, home equity, automobiles, and student loans. We disentang...

Heterogeneity in the Impact of Economic Cycles and the Great Recession: Effects within and across the Income Distribution

By Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes

American Economic Review, May 2015

In this paper, we examine the effects of economic cycles on low- to moderate-income families. We use variation across states and over time to estimate the effects of cycles on the distribution of income, using fine gradations of the household income-to-po...

Changes in Safety Net Use during the Great Recession

By Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

American Economic Review, May 2015

We examine how participation in social safety net programs differs by income-to-poverty levels, and how that relationship changed after the Great Recession. We define income-to-poverty based on the average of 2 years of merged CPS data, and investigate pr...

Living Arrangements, Doubling Up, and the Great Recession: Was This Time Different?

By Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes

American Economic Review, May 2015

The Great Recession marks the worst downturn since those of the early 1980s. A large literature considers how the public safety net responded to this shock. We instead consider the responsiveness of one dimension of the private safety net. Families can re...

The Effect of Extended Unemployment Insurance Benefits: Evidence from the 2012-2013 Phase-Out

By Henry S. Farber, Jesse Rothstein, and Robert G. Valletta

American Economic Review, May 2015

Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the ...