Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Trade-Off

By Peter Arcidiacono and Michael Lovenheim

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

This paper reviews the literature on affirmative action in undergraduate education and law schools, focusing especially on the trade-off between institutional quality and the fit between a school and a student. We discuss the conditions under which affirm...

Regulatory Races: The Effects of Jurisdictional Competition on Regulatory Standards

By Bruce G. Carruthers and Naomi R. Lamoreaux

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

This article surveys the literature on regulatory arbitrage in four settings: labor regulation, environmental protection, corporate governance, and banking and finance. For a regulatory race to occur, firms must migrate across state or country borders in ...

The Economics of Temporary Migrations

By Christian Dustmann and Joseph-Simon Görlach

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Many migrations are temporary -- a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration. Such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants' economic behavior, gene...

Why Organizations Fail: Models and Cases

By Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Organizations fail due to incentive problems (agents do not want to act in the organization's interests) and bounded rationality problems (agents do not have the necessary information to do so). This survey uses recent advances in organizational economics...

A Quantitative Review of Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family by Carbone and Cahn

By Kirsten Cornelson and Aloysius Siow

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

June Carbone and Naomi Cahn argue that growing earnings inequality and the increased educational attainment of women, relative to men, have led to declining marriage rates for less-educated women and an increase in positive assortative matching since the ...

The Politics of Financial Development: A Review of Calomiris and Haber's Fragile by Design

By Peter L. Rousseau

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Fragile by Design by Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber introduces a framework for understanding financial crises and credit abundance with politics at its center. Using the historical experiences of five nations to illustrate, the authors...

Did Science Cause the Industrial Revolution?

By Cormac Ó Gráda

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

The role of science and technology in the First Industrial Revolution is still contested. Some scholars, focusing on the textiles sector, argue that skilled and talented artisans with no scientific training were mainly responsible for the key inventions; ...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2016

Front Matter includes Theodore C. Bergstrom: Distinguished Fellow 2015

The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

By Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, April 2016

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO's impacts on children's long-term outcomes using tax data. We find ...

Long-Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net

By Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond

American Economic Review, April 2016

We examine the impact of a positive and policy-driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood. We focus on the introduction of the Food Stamp Program, which was rolled out across counties between 1961 and 1975. We use the P...

The Long-Run Impact of Cash Transfers to Poor Families

By Anna Aizer, Shari Eli, Joseph Ferrie, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

American Economic Review, April 2016

We estimate the long-run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children's longevity, educational attainment, nutritional status, and income in adulthood. To do so, we collected individual- level administrative records of applicants to the Mother...

Bounding the Labor Supply Responses to a Randomized Welfare Experiment: A Revealed Preference Approach

By Patrick Kline and Melissa Tartari

American Economic Review, April 2016

We study the short-term impact of Connecticut's Jobs First welfare reform experiment on women's labor supply and welfare participation decisions. A nonparametric optimizing model is shown to restrict the set of counterfactual choices compatible with ea...

Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration

By Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson

American Economic Review, April 2016

The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large ...

The Evolution of Strategic Sophistication

By Nikolaus Robalino and Arthur Robson

American Economic Review, April 2016

This paper investigates the evolutionary foundation for our ability to attribute preferences to others, an ability that is central to conventional game theory. We argue here that learning others' preferences allows individuals to efficiently modify their...

Group Strategy-Proofness in Private Good Economies

By Salvador Barberà, Dolors Berga, and Bernardo Moreno

American Economic Review, April 2016

Many salient rules to allocate private goods are not only strategy-proof, but also group strategy-proof, in appropriate domains of definition, hence diminishing the traditional conflict between incentives and efficiency. That is so for solutions to matc...