The Structure of Economic Modeling of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change: Grafting Gross Underestimation of Risk onto Already Narrow Science Models

By Nicholas Stern

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Scientists describe the scale of the risks from unmanaged climate change as potentially immense. However, the scientific models, because they omit key factors that are hard to capture precisely, appear to substantially underestimate these risks. Many ec...

Climate Change Policy: What Do the Models Tell Us?

By Robert S. Pindyck

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Very little. A plethora of integrated assessment models (IAMs) have been constructed and used to estimate the social cost of carbon (SCC) and evaluate alternative abatement policies. These models have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as to...

A Review of Scott E. Page's The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

By Yannis M. Ioannides

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

This assessment of Scott Page's The Difference (Princeton University Press, 2007) emphasizes the depth and breadth of the book's coverage and arguments and checks them against existing empirical evidence, when available. It argues that the book...

Patent Citations and the Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: A Reassessment

By Peter Thompson and Melanie Fox-Kean

American Economic Review, March 2005

Patent Citations and the Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: A Reassessment: Comment

By Rebecca Henderson, Adam Jaffe, and Manuel Trajtenberg

American Economic Review, March 2005

Patent Citations and the Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: A Reassessment: Reply

By Peter Thompson and Melanie Fox-Kean

American Economic Review, March 2005

ACE—Analytic Climate Economy

By Christian P. Traeger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

I study optimal carbon taxation in an analytic quantitative integrated assessment model (IAM) that links IAM components, parametric assumptions, and calibration approaches directly to their policy impacts. I show how temperature's tax impact differs from ...

The Importance of Financial Literacy: Opening a New Field

[Symposium: Wealth]

By Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to determine who is ...

Hiring Frictions and the Promise of Online Job Portals: Evidence from India

By A. Nilesh Fernando, Niharika Singh, and Gabriel Tourek

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

Despite the growing prominence of online job portals, firms remain reluctant to hire outside traditional recruitment networks. We find that experimentally providing firms with a combination of advertising and the ability to verify applicant identity incre...

Universal Basic Income: A Dynamic Assessment

By Diego Daruich and Raquel Fernández

American Economic Review, January 2024

Universal basic income (UBI) is an increasingly popular policy proposal, but there is no evidence regarding its longer-term consequences. We find that UBI generates large welfare losses in a general equilibrium model with imperfect capital markets, labor ...

Can Financial Incentives to Firms Improve Apprenticeship Training? Experimental Evidence from Ghana

By Gabriel Brown, Morgan Hardy, Isaac Mbiti, Jamie McCasland, and Isabelle Salcher

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

We use a field experiment to test whether financial incentives can improve the quality of apprenticeship training. Trainers (firm owners) in the treatment group participated in a tournament incentive scheme where they received a payment based on their app...

The Marginal Disutility from Corruption in Social Programs: Evidence from Program Administrators and Beneficiaries

By Arya Gaduh, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Concerns about fraud in welfare programs are common arguments worldwide against such programs. We conducted a survey experiment with over 28,000 welfare program administrators and over 19,000 beneficiaries in Indonesia to elicit the "marginal disutility f...

Why Is Productivity Slowing Down?

By Ian Goldin, Pantelis Koutroumpis, François Lafond, and Julian Winkler

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2024

We examine the contribution of different explanations to the slowdown of labor productivity. Comparing the post-2005 period with the preceding decade for five advanced economies, we seek to explain a slowdown of 0.8 to 1.8 pp. No single explanation acco...

Multigenerational Transmission of Wealth: Florence, 1403–1480

By Marianna Belloc, Francesco Drago, Mattia Fochesato, and Roberto Galbiati

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

By using hand-collected data on households' wealth assessments, we study multigenerational mobility in Florence during the late Middle Ages. We find that Florentine society was more mobile than one would expect but also that multigenerational mobility was...

How Economists Could Help Inform Economic and Budget Analysis Used by the US Congress

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Staff of the Congressional Budget Office

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The US Congress uses economic and budgetary projections, cost estimates for proposed legislation, and other analyses provided by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as part of its legislative process. CBO makes assessments based on an understanding of f...

Differences in Teachers' Assessments of Students by English Learner Status

By Maria Zhu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper investigates potential disparities in how teachers perceive academic achievement between English Learner (EL) students and their non-EL counterparts. Using data on elementary and middle school students in North Carolina, I compare teachers' aca...

The NY Fed DSGE Model: A Post-COVID Assessment

By Marco Del Negro, Keshav Dogra, Aidan Gleich, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, Ramya Nallamotu, and Brian Pacula

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We document the real-time forecasting performance for output and inflation of the New York Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model since 2011. We find the DSGE's accuracy to be comparable to that of private forecasters before COVID but som...

Contingent Valuation: A Practical Alternative When Prices Aren't Available

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By Richard T. Carson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

A person may be willing to make an economic tradeoff to assure that a wilderness area or scenic resource is protected even if neither that person nor (perhaps) anyone else will actually visit this area. This tradeoff is commonly labeled "passive use valu...

Aggregate and Intergenerational Implications of School Closures: A Quantitative Assessment

By Youngsoo Jang and Minchul Yum

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2024

This paper quantitatively investigates the medium- and long-term macroeconomic and distributional consequences of school closures through intergenerational channels. The model economy is a dynastic overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in whic...

Understanding Persistent ZLB: Theory and Assessment

By Pablo Cuba-Borda and Sanjay R. Singh

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2024

We develop a theoretical framework that rationalizes two hypotheses of long-lasting low-interest rate episodes: deflationary-expectations-traps and secular stagnation in a unified setting. These hypotheses differ in the sign of the theoretical correlation...