Roland Fryer: 2015 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Roland Fryer is an extraordinary applied microeconomist whose research output related to racial inequality, the US racial achievement gap, and the design and evaluation of educational policies make him a worthy recipient of the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal...

Retrospectives: What Did the Ancient Greeks Mean by Oikonomia?

By Dotan Leshem

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Nearly every economist has at some point in the standard coursework been exposed to a brief explanation that the origin of the word "economy" can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomia, which in turn is composed of two words: oikos, whic...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

The Doing Business Project: How It Started: Correspondence

By Simeon Djankov

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

The Determinants and Welfare Implications of US Workers' Diverging Location Choices by Skill: 1980-2000

By Rebecca Diamond

American Economic Review, March 2016

From 1980 to 2000, the rise in the US college/high school graduate wage gap coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. This paper estimates a structural spatial equilibrium model to det...

University Differences in the Graduation of Minorities in STEM Fields: Evidence from California

By Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban M. Aucejo, and V. Joseph Hotz

American Economic Review, March 2016

We examine differences in minority science graduation rates among University of California campuses when racial preferences were in place. Less prepared minorities at higher ranked campuses had lower persistence rates in science and took longer to grad...

Search Design and Broad Matching

By Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler

American Economic Review, March 2016

We study decentralized mechanisms for allocating firms into search pools. The pools are created in response to noisy preference signals provided by consumers, who then browse the pools via costly random sequential search. Surplus-maximizing search pool...

How Do Electricity Shortages Affect Industry? Evidence from India

By Hunt Allcott, Allan Collard-Wexler, and Stephen D. O'Connell

American Economic Review, March 2016

We estimate the effects of electricity shortages on Indian manufacturers, instrumenting with supply shifts from hydroelectric power availability. We estimate that India's average reported level of shortages reduces the average plant's revenues and prod...

Firm Dynamics, Job Turnover, and Wage Distributions in an Open Economy

By A. Kerem Coşar, Nezih Guner, and James Tybout

American Economic Review, March 2016

This paper explores the combined effects of reductions in trade frictions, tariffs, and firing costs on firm dynamics, job turnover, and wage distributions. It uses establishment-level data from Colombia to estimate an open economy dynamic model that li...

Parameter Learning in General Equilibrium: The Asset Pricing Implications

By Pierre Collin-Dufresne, Michael Johannes, and Lars A. Lochstoer

American Economic Review, March 2016

Parameter learning strongly amplifies the impact of macroeconomic shocks on marginal utility when the representative agent has a preference for early resolution of uncertainty. This occurs as rational belief updating generates subjective long-run consum...

Liquidity Trap and Excessive Leverage

By Anton Korinek and Alp Simsek

American Economic Review, March 2016

We investigate the role of macroprudential policies in mitigating liquidity traps. When constrained households engage in deleveraging, the interest rate needs to fall to induce unconstrained households to pick up the decline in aggregate demand. If the...

The Effect of Unemployment Benefits and Nonemployment Durations on Wages

By Johannes F. Schmieder, Till von Wachter, and Stefan Bender

American Economic Review, March 2016

We estimate that unemployment insurance (UI ) extensions reduce reemployment wages using sharp age discontinuities in UI eligibility in Germany. We show this effect combines two key policy parameters: the effect of UI on reservation wages and the effec...

The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study

By David J. Deming, Noam Yuchtman, Amira Abulafi, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, March 2016

We study employers' perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a lar...

Taxpayer Confusion: Evidence from the Child Tax Credit

By Naomi E. Feldman, Peter Katuščák, and Laura Kawano

American Economic Review, March 2016

We develop an empirical test for whether households understand or misperceive their marginal tax rate. Our identifying variation comes from the loss of the Child Tax Credit when a child turns 17. Using this age discontinuity, we find that despite this ...

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments: Comment

By Michal Krawczyk and Fabrice Le Lec

American Economic Review, March 2016

Based on experimental dictator games with probabilistic prospects, Brock, Lange, and Ozbay (2013) conclude that neither ex post nor ex ante comparisons can fully account for observed behavior. We argue that their conclusion that ex ante comparisons can...

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments: Reply

By J. Michelle Brock, Andreas Lange, and Erkut Y. Ozbay

American Economic Review, March 2016

In Brock, Lange, and Ozbay (2013), we experimentally investigate social preferences under risk. One of our conclusions is that a social preference model incorporating both ex ante and ex post fairness concerns may best describe behavior. Krawczyk and L...

A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade: Comment

By Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro, and Ignatius J. Horstmann

American Economic Review, March 2016

We show that the Armenter and Koren model's firm-product-country results rely on the assumption that export shipment size is independent of firm size, and this assumption is contradicted by the data. When actual shipment sizes are used in the balls-and-...

A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade: Reply

By Roc Armenter and Miklós Koren

American Economic Review, March 2016

Blum, Claro, and Horstmann (2016) make two statements about the balls-and-bins model of Armenter and Koren (2014). First, that using firm-level shipment data changes some of our results. Second, that the balls-and-bins model is not an appropriate stati...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2016