For two decades, the consensus explanation of the British Industrial Revolution has placed technological change and the supply side at center stage, affording little or no role for demand or overseas trade. Recently, alternative explanations have placed an emphasis on the importance of trade with New World colonies, and the expanded supply of raw cotton it provided. We test both hypotheses using calibrated general equilibrium models of the British economy and the rest of the world for 1760 and 1850. Neither claim is supported. Trade was vital for the progress of the industrial revolution; but it was trade with the rest of the world, not the American colonies, that allowed Britain to export its rapidly expanding textile output and achieve growth through extreme specialization in response to shifting comparative advantage.

The Role of Information in Medical Markets: An Analysis of Publicly Reported Outcomes in Cardiac Surgery by David M. Cutler, Robert S. Huckman and Mary Beth Landrum. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 342-346 of American Economic Review, May 2004

Changing Labor-Market Opportunities for Women and the Quality of Teachers, 1957-2000 by Sean P. Corcoran, William N. Evans and Robert M. Schwab. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 230-235 of American Economic Review, May 2004

The authors consider an individual who lacks the information-processing capacity required for a direct comparison of all feasible allocations. Instead of finding at once a best allocation, the individual myopically adjusts his current allocation toward higher utility. The individual makes adjustment errors inversely proportional to his ability to choose. The authors compare the stationary state of this process with the standard model. They see how an imperfect ability to choose modifies both positive and normative predictions of the standard model and how the standard model can be obtained from the authors' more general one as the special case corresponding to perfect ability.

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act was enacted to monitor minority and low-income access to the mortgage market. The data collected for this purpose show that minorities are more than twice as likely to be denied a mortgage as whites. Yet variables correlated with both race and creditworthiness were omitted from these data, making any conclusion about race's role in mortgage lending impossible. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston collected additional variables important to the mortgage lending decision and found that race continued to play an important, though significantly diminished, role in the decision to grant a mortgage.

We compare two approaches to increasing tax revenue: tax administration and tax rates. We show that when Indonesia moved top regional firms into “medium taxpayer offices,” with high staff-to-taxpayer ratios, tax revenue more than doubled. Examining nonlinear changes to corporate income tax rates, we estimate an elasticity of taxable income of 0.579. Combining these estimates, improved tax administration is equivalent to raising top rates on all firms by 8 percentage points. On net, improved tax administration can have significant returns for developing countries.

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in US history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics—but not employment dynamics—during the pandemic. Second, benefit expansions allow us to study the MPC of normally low-liquidity households in a high-liquidity state. These households still have high MPCs. This suggests a role for permanent behavioral characteristics, rather than just current liquidity, in driving spending behavior. Third, the mechanisms driving our results imply that temporary benefit supplements are a promising countercyclical tool.

Motivated by the question of how one should evaluate professional election forecasters, we study a novel dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. A principal who wishes to hire only high-quality forecasters is faced with an agent of unknown quality. The agent privately observes signals about a publicly observable future event, and may strategically misrepresent information to inflate the principal’s perception of his quality. We show that the optimal deterministic mechanism is simple and easy to implement in practice: it evaluates a single, optimally timed prediction. We study the generality of this result and its robustness to randomization and noncommitment.

Premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs, either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated. This creates inefficiencies when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple econometric model to study this problem and estimate it using data on small employers. We find a welfare loss of 2-11 percent of coverage costs compared to what is feasible with risk rating. Only about one-quarter of this is due to inefficiently chosen uniform contribution levels. We also investigate the reclassification risk created by risk rating individual incremental premiums, finding only a modest welfare cost.