Can Owning a Home Hedge the Risk of Moving?

By Todd Sinai and Nicholas Souleles

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

For households that face a possibility of moving across MSAs, the risk of home owning depends on the covariance of the sale prices of their current houses with the purchase prices of their likely future houses. We find empirically that households tend ...

Measuring the Effect of Blended Learning: Evidence from a Selective Liberal Arts College

By Aaron Swoboda and Lauren Feiler

American Economic Review, May 2016

We compare introductory microeconomics courses that employ a blended learning approach to more traditional control courses at a selective liberal arts college. The blended learning courses required students to complete online homework and watch video lect...

All in the Extended Family: Effects of Grandparents, Aunts, and Uncles on Educational Attainment

By Linda Datcher Loury

American Economic Review, May 2006

Banks as Secret Keepers

By Tri Vi Dang, Gary Gorton, Bengt Holmström, and Guillermo Ordoñez

American Economic Review, April 2017

Banks produce short-term debt for transactions and storing value. The value of this debt must not vary over time so agents can easily trade it at par like money. To produce money-like safe liquidity, banks keep detailed information about their loans secre...

Politics and Local Economic Growth: Evidence from India

By Sam Asher and Paul Novosad

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

Political favoritism affects the allocation of government resources, but is it consequential for growth? Using a close election regression discontinuity design and data from India, we measure the local economic impact of being represented by a politician ...

Do Temporary-Help Jobs Improve Labor Market Outcomes for Low-Skilled Workers? Evidence from "Work First"

By David H. Autor and Susan N. Houseman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Temporary-help jobs offer rapid entry into paid employment, but they are typically brief and it is unknown whether they foster longer term employment. We utilize the unique structure of Detroit's welfare-to- work program to identify the effect of tempor...

Hedge Funds and the Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management

By Franklin R. Edward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

The Fed-engineered rescue of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in September 1998 set off alarms throughout financial markets about the activities of hedge funds and the stability of financial markets in general. With only $4.8 billion in equity, LTCM ma...

A Skeptical View of the National Science Foundation's Role in Economic Research

[Symposium: NSF Funding for Economists]

By Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

We can imagine a plausible case for government support of science based on traditional economic reasons of externalities and public goods. Yet when it comes to government support of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for economic research, ...

Dollarization

By Alberto Alesina and Robert J. Barro

American Economic Review, May 2001

Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs

By Nathan Nunn and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra

American Economic Review, May 2017

Across human societies, one sees many examples of deeply rooted and widely held beliefs that are almost certainly untrue. Examples include beliefs about witchcraft, magic, ordeals, and superstitions. Why are such incorrect beliefs so prevalent and how do ...

The Political Economy of the Greek Debt Crisis: A Tale of Two Bailouts

By Silvia Ardagna and Francesco Caselli

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

We review the events that led to the May 2010 and July 2011 bailout agreements. We interpret the bailouts as outcomes of political-economy equilibria. We argue that these equilibria were likely not on the Pareto frontier, and sketch political-economy a...

Interpreting Tests of School VAM Validity

By Joshua Angrist, Peter Hull, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters

American Economic Review, May 2016

We develop over-identification tests that use admissions lotteries to assess the predictive value of regression-based value-added models (VAMs). These tests have degrees of freedom equal to the number of quasi-experiments available to estimate school effe...

Helping Infant Economies Grow: Foundations of Trade Policies for Developing Countries

By Bruce Greenwald and Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, May 2006

Executive Turnover and Firm Performance in China

By Takao Kato and Cheryl Long

American Economic Review, May 2006

Urban Diversity and Economic Growth

[Symposium: Urban Agglomeration]

By John M. Quigley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

This paper considers the heterogeneity and diversity of cities as sources of economic growth. It links modern notions of economic growth to the distinguishing characteristics of cities and to the external effects on consumption and production produced by ...

Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing? Estimates from a "Repeat Income" Model

By Stuart S. Rosenthal

American Economic Review, February 2014

While filtering has long been considered the primary mechanism by which markets supply low-income housing, direct estimates of that process have been absent. This has contributed to doubts about the viability of markets and to misplaced policy. I fill ...

Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome

[Symposium: Macroeconomics after the Financial Crisis]

By Ricardo J. Caballero

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

The recent financial crisis has damaged the reputation of macroeconomics, largely for its inability to predict the impending financial and economic crisis. To be honest, this inability to predict does not concern me much. It is almost tautological that se...

Taxing Capital? Not a Bad Idea after All!

By Juan Carlos Conesa, Sagiri Kitao, and Dirk Krueger

American Economic Review, March 2009

We quantitatively characterize the optimal capital and labor income tax in an overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic, uninsurable income shocks and permanent productivity differences of households. The optimal capital income tax rate is signi...

The Geography of Trade and Technology Shocks in the United States

By David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the United States. Regional exposure to technological change, as measured by specialization in routine task-intensive production and clerical occupatio...

News, Noise, and Fluctuations: An Empirical Exploration

By Olivier J. Blanchard, Jean-Paul L'Huillier, and Guido Lorenzoni

American Economic Review, December 2013

We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations in which consumers form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information and these anticipations affect output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to...