In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850-1940

By Claudia Olivetti and M. Daniele Paserman

American Economic Review, August 2015

This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by...

Has Consumption Inequality Mirrored Income Inequality?

By Mark Aguiar and Mark Bils

American Economic Review, September 2015

We revisit to what extent the increase in income inequality since 1980 was mirrored by consumption inequality. We do so by constructing an alternative measure of consumption expenditure using a demand system to correct for systematic measurement error in ...

Education, HIV, and Early Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

By Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, September 2015

A seven-year randomized evaluation suggests education subsidies reduce adolescent girls' dropout, pregnancy, and marriage but not sexually transmitted infection (STI). The government's HIV curriculum, which stresses abstinence until marriage, does not red...

The Welfare Economics of Default Options in 401(k) Plans

By B. Douglas Bernheim, Andrey Fradkin, and Igor Popov

American Economic Review, September 2015

Default contribution rates for 401(k) pension plans powerfully influence choices. Potential causes include opt-out costs, procrastination, inattention, and psychological anchoring. Using realistically parameterized models, we show how the optimal default,...

Credit Constraints and Growth in a Global Economy

By Nicolas Coeurdacier, Stéphane Guibaud, and Keyu Jin

American Economic Review, September 2015

We show that in an open-economy OLG model, the interaction between growth differentials and household credit constraints—more severe in fast-growing countries—can explain three prominent global trends: a divergence in private saving rates between adva...

Cooperation, but No Reciprocity: Individual Strategies in the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma

By Yves Breitmoser

American Economic Review, September 2015

In the repeated prisoner's dilemma, predictions are notoriously difficult. Recently, however, Blonski, Ockenfels, and Spagnolo (2011)—henceforth, BOS‐showed that experimental subjects predictably cooperate when the discount factor exceeds a par...

The Value of Relationships: Evidence from a Supply Shock to Kenyan Rose Exports

By Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

American Economic Review, September 2015

This paper provides evidence on the importance of reputation in the context of the Kenyan rose export sector. A model of reputation and relational contracting is developed and tested. A seller's reputation is defined by buyer's beliefs about seller's reli...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2015

Health and the Economy in the United States from 1750 to the Present

By Dora L. Costa

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that ...

The Beveridge Curve: A Survey

By Michael W. L. Elsby, Ryan Michaels, and David Ratner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Important progress has been made in economists' understanding of the Beveridge curve, from its measurement to its expression in canonical labor market models. Yet enduring puzzles remain. Chief among these are the empirical role of vacancies in the recrui...

Communicating Uncertainty in Official Economic Statistics: An Appraisal Fifty Years after Morgenstern

By Charles F. Manski

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error free or ...

A Review of The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey Sachs

By Matthew E. Kahn

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

How does economic science inform the study of sustainable development? In his new book, Jeffrey D. Sachs analyzes the challenges of achieving economic growth while protecting the environment and achieving an equitable distribution of resources. This revie...

Learning from Failure: A Review of Peter Schuck's Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better

By David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf's theory of nonma...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

The Effect of Access to College Assessments on Enrollment and Attainment

By George Bulman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

This paper examines if students' college outcomes are sensitive to access to college admissions tests. I construct a dataset of every test center location and district policy in the United States linked to the universe of individual testing records and...

Racial Discrimination in Grading: Evidence from Brazil

By Fernando Botelho, Ricardo A. Madeira, and Marcos A. Rangel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

We investigate whether racial discrimination in the form of biased assessment of students is prevalent within Brazilian schools. Evidence is drawn from unique administrative data pertaining to eighth-grade students and educators. Holding constant perfo...

Professors in Core Science Fields Are Not Always Biased against Women: Evidence from France

By Thomas Breda and Son Thierry Ly

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

We investigate the link between how male-dominated a field is, and gender bias against women in this field. Taking the entrance exam of a French higher education institution as a natural experiment, we find that evaluation is actually biased in favor o...