Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms

By Elinor Ostrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

I assume multiple types of players--"rational egoists," as well as "conditional cooperators" and "willing punishers"--in models of nonmarket behavior. I use an indirect evolutionary approach to explain how multiple types of players could survive and flour...

Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads, and Informational Cascades

By Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

Learning by observing the past decisions of others can help explain some otherwise puzzling phenomena about human behavior. For example, why do people tend to converge on similar behavior? Why is mass behavior prone to error and fads? The authors argue th...

Why Are Indian Children So Short? The Role of Birth Order and Son Preference

By Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande

American Economic Review, September 2017

Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India's steep birth order gradient i...

The Determinants of Earnings: A Behavioral Approach

By Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

We survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success. We suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education, the inheritance of wealt...

Trade Costs

By James E. Anderson and Eric van Wincoop

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2004

This paper surveys the measurement of trade costs: what we know and don't know but may usefully attempt to learn. Partial and incomplete data on direct measures of costs go with inference on implicit costs from trade flows and prices. Total trade costs in...

Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps

By Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its effectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric stra...

Trade and Investment under Policy Uncertainty: Theory and Firm Evidence

By Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

In a dynamic model with sunk export costs, a firm's export investment is lower under trade policy uncertainty, and credible preferential trade agreements (PTAs) increase trade even if current tariffs are low. Exploring Portugal's accession to the European...

Achieving the DREAM: The Effect of IRCA on Immigrant Youth Postsecondary Educational Access

By Kalena E. Cortes

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper contributes to the existing literature on the effect of legal status on educational access among immigrant youth in the United States. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants who entered ...

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...

Access to Credit by Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa: How Relevant Is Gender?

By Elizabeth Asiedu, Isaac Kalonda-Kanyama, Leonce Ndikumana, and Akwasi Nti-Addae

American Economic Review, May 2013

The literature on the determinants of firms' financing constraints has paid little attention to gender as a determinant of access to finance. Using data for 34,342 firms from 90 developing countries, the paper analyzes the determinants of firms' financing...

Nonparametric Instrumental Variables Estimation

By Whitney K. Newey

American Economic Review, May 2013

In many economic models, objects of interest are functions which satisfy conditional moment restrictions. Economics does not restrict the functional form of these models, motivating nonparametric methods. In this paper we review identification results and...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Structural Change Out of Agriculture: Labor Push versus Labor Pull

By Francisco Alvarez-Cuadrado and Markus Poschke

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2011

A declining agricultural employment share is a key feature of economic development. Its main drivers are: improvements in agricultural technology combined with Engel's law release resources from agriculture ("labor push"), and improvements in industrial t...

Regulatory Redistribution in the Market for Health Insurance

By Jeffrey Clemens

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

Community-rating regulations equalize the insurance premiums faced by the healthy and the unhealthy. Intended reductions in the unhealthy's premiums can be undone, however, if the healthy forgo coverage. The severity of this adverse selection problem hing...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Does Extending Unemployment Benefits Improve Job Quality?

By Arash Nekoei and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, February 2017

Contrary to standard search models predictions, past studies have not found a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. We estimate a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based regression discontinuity design in Austria. A...

Are Female Leaders Good for Education? Evidence from India

By Irma Clots-Figueras

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

This paper shows that the gender of politicians affects the educational levels of individuals who grow up in the districts where these politicians are elected. A unique dataset collected on politicians in India is matched with individual data by cohort an...

Media Frenzies in Markets for Financial Information

By Laura L. Veldkamp

American Economic Review, June 2006

Emerging equity markets witness occasional surges in prices (frenzies) and crossmarket price dispersion (herds), accompanied by abundant media coverage. An information market complementarity can explain these anomalies. Because information has high fix...

Do Strikes Kill? Evidence from New York State

By Jonathan Gruber and Samuel A. Kleiner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

Hospitals now represent one of the largest union sectors of the US economy, and there is particular concern about the impact of strikes on patient welfare. We analyze the effects of nurses' strikes in hospitals on patient outcomes in New York State. Contr...

Determinants of Economic Growth: Will Data Tell?

By Antonio Ciccone and Marek Jarociński

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Can agnostics rely on international income data to tell them which matter? We find that agnostic priors lead to conclusions that are sensitive to differences across available i...