Segmented Housing Search

By Monika Piazzesi, Martin Schneider, and Johannes Stroebel

American Economic Review, March 2020

We study housing markets with multiple segments searched by heterogeneous clienteles. In the San Francisco Bay Area, search activity and inventory covary negatively across cities, but positively across market segments within cities. A quantitative search ...

Nondogmatic Social Discounting

By Antony Millner

American Economic Review, March 2020

The long-run social discount rate has an enormous effect on the value of climate mitigation, infrastructure projects, and other long-term public policies. Its value is however highly contested, in part because of normative disagreements about social time ...

Endogenous Monitoring in a Partnership Game

By Anna Sanktjohanser

American Economic Review, March 2020

I consider a repeated game in which, due to imperfect monitoring, no collusion can be sustained. I add a self-interested monitor who commits to obtain private signals of firms' actions and sends a public message. The monitor makes an offer specifying the ...

Rural Roads and Local Economic Development

By Sam Asher and Paul Novosad

American Economic Review, March 2020

Nearly one billion people worldwide live in rural areas without access to national paved road networks. We estimate the impacts of India's 40 billion USD national rural road construction program using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and comprehens...

Maternal Depression, Women's Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

By Victoria Baranov, Sonia Bhalotra, Pietro Biroli, and Joanna Maselko

American Economic Review, March 2020

We evaluate the medium-term impacts of treating maternal depression on women's mental health, financial empowerment, and parenting decisions. We leverage variation induced by a cluster-randomized controlled trial that provided psychotherapy to 903 prenata...

Fiscal Rules, Bailouts, and Reputation in Federal Governments

By Alessandro Dovis and Rishabh Kirpalani

American Economic Review, March 2020

Expectations of transfers by central governments incentivize overborrowing by local governments. In this paper, we ask if fiscal rules can reduce overborrowing if central governments cannot commit to enforce penalties when rules are violated. We study a m...

Raising Capital from Heterogeneous Investors

By Marina Halac, Ilan Kremer, and Eyal Winter

American Economic Review, March 2020

A firm raises capital from multiple investors to fund a project. The project succeeds only if the capital raised exceeds a stochastic threshold, and the firm offers payments contingent on success. We study the firm's optimal unique-implementation scheme, ...

The Race to the Base

By Dan Bernhardt, Peter Buisseret, and Sinem Hidir

American Economic Review, March 2020

We study multi-district legislative elections between two office-seeking parties when one party has an initial valence advantage that may shift and even reverse during the campaign; and, each party cares not only about winning a majority, but also about i...

The Trouble With Electricity Markets: Understanding California's Restructuring Disaster

By Severin Borenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

In June 2000, after two years of fairly smooth operation, California's deregulated wholesale electricity market began producing extremely high prices and threats of supply shortages. The upheaval demonstrated dramatically why most current electricity mark...

Policy Watch: U.S. Disability Policy in a Changing Environment

By Richard V. Burkhauser and Mary C. Daly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

In this paper we provide a context for evaluating the goals and effectiveness of current disability policy. We review the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs and examine trends in disability benefit receipt and e...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

Inside Job or Deep Impact? Extramural Citations and the Influence of Economic Scholarship

By Josh Angrist, Pierre Azoulay, Glenn Ellison, Ryan Hill, and Susan Feng Lu

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

Does academic economic research produce material of general scientific value, or do academic economists write only for peers? Is economics scholarship uniquely insular? We address these questions by quantifying interactions between economics and other d...

Historical Legacies and African Development

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent's economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus is rem...

What Remains of Cross-Country Convergence?

By Paul Johnson and Chris Papageorgiou

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

We examine the record of cross-country growth over the past fifty years and ask if developing countries have made progress on closing the income gap between their per capita incomes and those in the advanced economies. We conclude that, as a group, they h...

What Students Learn in Economics 101: Time for a Change

By Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

We make the case for a shift in what students learn in a first economics course, taking as our exemplar Paul Samuelson's paradigm-setting 1948 text. In the shadow of the Great Depression, Samuelson made Keynesian economics an essential component of what...

Reflections of a Textbook Author

By N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

In this essay, I reflect on textbook writing after three decades of participating in the activity. I address the following questions: What perspective should textbooks take? What is the best approach to teaching microeconomics? What is the best approach t...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

Data Watch: Research Data from Transition Economies

By Randall K. Filer and Jan Hanousek

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

Ten years into the transition from communism in the countries of the former Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe, a cursory search of the EconLit database turns up hundreds of empirical studies published in refereed journals that deal with various ...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020