The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Articles in this Issue
Believed Gender Differences in Social Preferences
Abstract While there is a vast (and mixed) literature on gender differences in social preferences, little is known about believed gender differences in social preferences. Using data fr...
Costs of Financing U.S. Federal Debt Under a Gold Standard: 1791-1933
Abstract From a new data set, we infer time series of term structures of yields on U.S. federal bonds during the gold standard era from 1791–1933 and use our estimates to reassess histo...
The Global Race for Talent: Brain Drain, Knowledge Transfer, and Growth
Abstract How does inventors’ migration affect international talent allocation, knowledge diffusion, and productivity growth? To answer this question, I build a novel two-country innovat...
Do Financial Concerns Make Workers Less Productive?
Abstract Workers who are worried about their personal finances may find it hard to focus at work. If so, reducing financial concerns could increase productivity. We test this hypothesis...
A Cognitive View of Policing
Abstract What causes adverse policing outcomes, such as excessive uses of force and unnecessary arrests? Prevailing explanations focus on problematic officers or deficient regulations a...
A Welfare Analysis of Tax Audits Across the Income Distribution
Abstract We estimate the returns to IRS audits of taxpayers across the income distribution. We find an additional $1 spent auditing taxpayers above the 90th income percentile yields mor...
War Reparations, Structural Change, and Intergenerational Mobility
Abstract From 1944 to 1952, largely agrarian Finland had to export, on average, 4% of its yearly GDP in industrial products to the Soviet Union as war reparations. To meet the reparatio...
Reserves Were Not So Ample After All
Abstract We show that the likelihood of a liquidity crunch in wholesale U.S. dollar funding markets depends on levels of reserve balances at the financial institutions that are the most...
LinkedOut? A Field Experiment on Discrimination in Job Network Formation
Abstract We assess the impact of discrimination on Black individuals’ job networks across the United States using a two-stage field experiment with 400+ fictitious LinkedIn profiles. In...
Trust at Scale: The Economic Limits of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Abstract Satoshi Nakamoto (2008) invented a new kind of economic system that does not need the support of government or rule of law. Trust and security instead arise from a combination...
Overinference from Weak Signals and Underinference from Strong Signals
Abstract When people receive new information, sometimes they revise their beliefs too much, and sometimes too little. We show that a key driver of whether people overinfer or underinfer...
The Long-Run Impacts of Public Industrial Investment on Local Development and Economic Mobility: Evidence from World War II
Abstract This article studies the long-run effects of government-led construction of manufacturing plants on the regions where they were built and on individuals from those regions. Spe...
Mandatory Notice of Layoff, Job Search, and Efficiency
Abstract In all OECD countries, mandatory notice (MN) policies require firms to inform workers in advance of a layoff. In our theoretical framework, MN helps workers avoid unemployment...
Measuring and Mitigating Racial Disparities in Tax Audits
Abstract Tax authorities around the world rely on audits to detect underreported tax liabilities and to verify that taxpayers qualify for the benefits they claim. We study differences i...
Present Bias Amplifies the Household Balance-Sheet Channels of Macroeconomic Policy
Abstract We study the effect of monetary and fiscal policy in a heterogeneous-agent model where households have present-biased time preferences and naive beliefs. The model features a l...