Migrants at Sea: Unintended Consequences of Search and Rescue Operations

By Claudio Deiana, Vikram Maheshri, and Giovanni Mastrobuoni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Many countries are facing and resisting strong migratory pressure, fueling irregular migration. In response to mounting deaths in the Central Mediterranean, European nations intensified rescue operations in 2013. We develop a model of irregular migration ...

Auditability in School Choice

By Aram Grigoryan and Markus Möller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

In centralized public school admissions, participants may not fully observe other participants' preference rankings and priorities. In this paper, we evaluate prominent assignment rules in terms of their auditability properties. We show that Serial Dictat...

Welfare Comparisons for Biased Learning

By Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, and Yuhta Ishii

American Economic Review, June 2024

We study robust welfare comparisons of learning biases (misspecified Bayesian and some forms of non-Bayesian updating). Given a true signal distribution, we deem one bias more harmful than another if it yields lower objective expected payoffs in all decis...

The Political Economics of Non-democracy

By Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Nondemocratic regimes face multiple challenges to their rule, both internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, and external, such ...

Optimal Income Taxation

By Louis Kaplow

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

This article explores subjects in optimal income taxation characterized by recent research interest, practical importance in light of concerns about inequality, potential for misunderstanding, and prospects for advancement. Throughout the analysis, path...

Opportunity Unraveled: Private Information and the Missing Markets for Financing Human Capital

By Daniel Herbst and Nathaniel Hendren

American Economic Review, July 2024

We examine whether adverse selection has unraveled private markets for equity and state-contingent debt contracts for financing higher education. Using survey data on beliefs, we show a typical college-goer would have to repay $1.64 in present value for e...

Personalized Pricing and Competition

By Andrew Rhodes and Jidong Zhou

American Economic Review, July 2024

We study personalized pricing in a general oligopoly model. The impact of personalized pricing relative to uniform pricing hinges on the degree of market coverage. If market conditions are such that coverage is high (e.g., the production cost is low or th...

Signaling in Retrospect and the Informational Structure of Markets

By Michael Spence

American Economic Review, June 2002

Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820-1992

By François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson

American Economic Review, September 2002

This paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries. The estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to World War II and after that se...

Monitoring, Motivation, and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment

By Daniel S. Nagin, James B. Rebitzer, Seth Sanders, and Lowell J. Taylor

American Economic Review, September 2002

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are "rational cheaters," who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate t...

Revisiting Kindness and Confusion in Public Goods Experiments

By Daniel Houser and Robert Kurzban

American Economic Review, September 2002

Implementing the Efficient Allocation of Pollution

By John Duggan and Joanne Roberts

American Economic Review, September 2002

Economic Status and Health in Childhood: The Origins of the Gradient

By Anne Case, Darren Lubotsky, and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, December 2002

The well-known positive association between health and income in adulthood has antecedents in childhood. Not only is children's health positively related to household income, but the relationship between household income and children's health becomes more...

Social Value of Public Information

By Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin

American Economic Review, December 2002

What are the welfare effects of enhanced dissemination of public information through the media and disclosures by market participants with high public visibility? We examine the impact of public information in a setting where agents take actions appropria...

Effects of Environmental and Land Use Regulation in the Oil and Gas Industry Using the Wyoming Checkerboard as an Experimental Design

By Mitch Kunce, Shelby Gerking, and William Morgan

American Economic Review, December 2002

Portfolio Choice and Trading in a Large 401(k) Plan

By Julie Agnew, Pierluigi Balduzzi, and Annika Sundén

American Economic Review, March 2003

We study nearly 7,000 retirement accounts during the April 1994-August 1998 period. Several interesting patterns emerge. Most asset allocations are extreme (either 100 percent or zero percent in equities) and there is inertia in asset allocations. Equity ...

Optimal Contracting with Subjective Evaluation

By W. Bentley MacLeod

American Economic Review, March 2003

This paper extends the standard principal-agent model to allow for subjective evaluation. The optimal contract results in more compressed pay relative to the case with verifiable performance measures. Moreover, discrimination against an individual implies...

Corporate Lobbying and Commitment Failure in Capital Taxation

By Nicolas Marceau and Michael Smart

American Economic Review, March 2003

Access to Food and the Biological Standard of Living: Perspectives on the Nutritional Status of Native Americans

By John Komlos

American Economic Review, March 2003

The Mismatch Between Life Insurance Holdings and Financial Vulnerabilities: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

By B. Douglas Bernheim, Lorenzo Forni, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff

American Economic Review, March 2003