Global Cycles: Capital Flows, Commodities, and Sovereign Defaults, 1815-2015

By Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Review, May 2016

Capital flow and commodity cycles have long been connected with economic crises. Sparse historical data, however, has made it difficult to connect their timing. We date turning points in global capital flows and commodity prices across two centuries and p...

When Do Capital Inflow Surges End in Tears?

By Atish R. Ghosh, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Mahvash S. Qureshi

American Economic Review, May 2016

We investigate in a sample of 53 emerging markets over 1980-2014 whether countries with open capital accounts are necessarily at the mercy of global events, or are able to take policy actions when receiving inflows to mitigate the impact of a subsequent r...

Information Design, Bayesian Persuasion, and Bayes Correlated Equilibrium

By Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, May 2016

A set of players have preferences over a set of outcomes. We consider the problem of an "information designer" who can choose an information structure for the players to serve his ends, but has no ability to change the mechanism (or force the players to m...

Bayesian Persuasion in Coordination Games

By Itay Goldstein and Chong Huang

American Economic Review, May 2016

We analyze a coordination game of regime change where the policy maker, who tries to increase the probability of the survival of the regime, commits ex ante to abandon the regime automatically when its fundamentals are below a certain threshold. This poli...

A Rothschild-Stiglitz Approach to Bayesian Persuasion

By Matthew Gentzkow and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Review, May 2016

Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970) represent random variables as convex functions (integrals of the cumulative distribution function). Combining this representation with Blackwell's Theorem (1953), we characterize distributions of posterior means that can be ...

Shutting Down the Thermohaline Circulation

By David Anthoff, Francisco Estrada, and Richard S. J. Tol

American Economic Review, May 2016

Past climatic changes were caused by a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation. We use results from experiments with three climate models to show that the expected cooling due to a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation is less in magnitude than the ex...

A Potential Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Implications for Economic Analyses of Climate Policy

By Delavane Diaz and Klaus Keller

American Economic Review, May 2016

The Earth system may react in a nonlinear threshold response to climate forcings. Incorporating threshold responses into integrated assessment models (IAMs) used for climate policy analysis poses nontrivial challenges, for example due to methodological li...

The Ecosystem Impacts of Severe Warming

By Robert Mendelsohn, Iain C. Prentice, Oswald Schmitz, Benjamin Stocker, Robert Buchkowski, and Benjamin Dawson

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper uses a quantitative dynamic ecosystem vegetation model to explore the potential impact of warming up to 9-12 degrees C on global ecosystems. The paper does not find evidence of a global collapse in terrestrial ecosystems but there is evidence o...

Economic Effects of an Ocean Acidification Catastrophe

By Stephen G. Colt and Gunnar P. Knapp

American Economic Review, May 2016

We assess the potential magnitude of the economic effects of an ocean acidification (OA) catastrophe by focusing on marine ecosystem services most likely to be affected. It is scientifically plausible that by 2200 OA could cause a complete collapse of mar...

How Mortgage Finance Reform Could Affect Housing

By John V. Duca, John Muellbauer, and Anthony Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2016

Although major changes in mortgage finance have occurred since the subprime bust, several issues remain unresolved, centering on the roles of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA. We analyze how some reforms might affect house prices in a framework rich e...

Borrowing Constraints and Homeownership

By Arthur Acolin, Jesse Bricker, Paul Calem, and Susan Wachter

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper identifies the impact of borrowing constraints on homeownership in the U.S. in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. While homeownership declines and tightened credit are evident, the role the tightening of credit has had on the probabili...

A Lost Generation? Education Decisions and Employment Outcomes during the US Housing Boom-Bust Cycle of the 2000s

By Luc Laeven and Alexander Popov

American Economic Review, May 2016

We exploit regional variations in U.S. house price fluctuations during the boom-bust cycle of the 2000s to study the impact of the housing cycle on young Americans' choices related to education and employment. We find that in MSAs which experienced large ...

To Buy or Not to Buy: Consumer Constraints in the Housing Market

By Andreas Fuster and Basit Zafar

American Economic Review, May 2016

We use a strategic household survey to study the sensitivity of intended homeownership decisions to financing constraints. We find that the average stated likelihood of buying a home is strongly sensitive to the size of the required down payment, which we...

The Role of Bequests in Shaping Wealth Inequality: Evidence from Danish Wealth Records

By Simon H. Boserup, Wojciech Kopczuk, and Claus T. Kreiner

American Economic Review, May 2016

Using Danish administrative data, we estimate the impact of bequests on the level and inequality of wealth. We compare the distributions of wealth over time of people whose parent died and those whose parent did not. Bequests account for 26 percent of the...

Revenue and Incentive Effects of Basis Step-Up at Death: Lessons from the 2010 "Voluntary" Estate Tax Regime

By Robert Gordon, David Joulfaian, and James Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2016

In 2010, the U.S. estate tax expired and executors of wealthy decedents were not required to file estate tax returns. In the absence of the estate tax, beneficiaries received assets with carryover rather than stepped-up basis. Unrealized capital gains acc...

Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting: San Francisco, CA, January 3, 2016

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2016

Report of the Secretary

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2016

Report of the Treasurer

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2016

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2016

List of Online Reports

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2016