A Change Would Do You Good .... An Experimental Study on How to Overcome Coordination Failure in Organizations

By Jordi Brandts and David J. Cooper

American Economic Review, June 2006

We study how financial incentives can be used to overcome a history of coordination failure using controlled laboratory experiments. Subjects' payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels. In an initial phase, the benefits of coordination are l...

Paying Not to Go to the Gym

By Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier

American Economic Review, June 2006

How do consumers choose from a menu of contracts? We analyze a novel dataset from three U.S. health clubs with information on both the contractual choice and the day-to-day attendance decisions of 7,752 members over three years. The observed consumer b...

Pareto-Improving Social Security Reform when Financial Markets are Incomplete!?

By Dirk Krueger and Felix Kubler

American Economic Review, June 2006

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with stochastic production and incomplete markets to assess whether the introduction of an unfunded social security system leads to a Pareto improvement. When returns to capital and wages are imperfec...

The Determinants of Mortality

[Symposium: Disease and Development]

By David Cutler, Angus Deaton, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The pleasures of life are worth nothing if one is not alive to experience them. Through the twentieth century in the United States and other high-income countries, growth in real incomes was accompanied by a historically unprecedented decline in mortality...

Initial Labor Market Conditions and Long-Term Outcomes for Economists

[Symposium: The Market for Economists]

By Paul Oyer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

Each year, graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk. Given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia, one mig...

An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis

By Jahn K. Hakes and Raymond D. Sauer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

Michael Lewis's book, Moneyball, describes how an innovative manager working for the Oakland Athletics successfully exploited an inefficiency in baseball's labor market over a prolonged period of time. We evaluate Lewis's claims by applying standar...

Multiple Dimensions of Private Information: Evidence from the Long-Term Care Insurance Market

By Amy Finkelstein and Kathleen McGarry

American Economic Review, September 2006

We demonstrate the existence of multiple dimensions of private information in the long-term care insurance market. Two types of people purchase insurance: individuals with private information that they are high risk and individuals with private informa...

A Model of Forum Shopping

By Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, September 2006

Owners of intellectual property or mere sponsors of an idea (e.g., authors, security issuers, sponsors of standards) resort to more or less independent certifiers to persuade potential users (buyers or adopters) of the worth of their property or idea. W...

$1,000 Cash Back: The Pass-Through of Auto Manufacturer Promotions

By Meghan Busse, Jorge Silva-Risso, and Florian Zettelmeyer

American Economic Review, September 2006

Automobile manufacturers frequently use promotions involving cash incentives. While payments are nominally directed to either customers or dealers, the ultimate beneficiary of the promotion depends on the outcome of price negotiation. We use program ev...

The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer

[Symposium: Macroeconomic Lessons]

By N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

The subfield of macroeconomics was born, not as a science, but more as a type of engineering. The problem that gave birth to our field was the Great Depression. God put macroeconomists on earth not to propose and test elegant theories but to solve practic...

The European Central Bank, the Euro, and Global Financial Markets

[Symposium: The Euro]

By Kathryn M. E. Dominguez

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

The economic case for European monetary union was shaky at best when it was first discussed 35 years ago. Europe's leaders felt that monetary union was the capstone to their efforts to create an integrated Europe, and much to the rest of the world's surpr...

Avoiding Invalid Instruments and Coping with Weak Instruments

By Michael P. Murray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Archimedes said, "Give me the place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the Earth." Economists have their own powerful lever: the instrumental variable estimator. The instrumental variable estimator can avoid the bias that ordinary least s...

The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap

By Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor's degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the na...

Child Labor and the Labor Supply of Other Household Members: Evidence from 1920 America

By Marco Manacorda

American Economic Review, December 2006

This paper exploits the variation in the legal minimum working age across states in 1920 America in order to identify households' labor supply responses to exogenous changes in children's labor force participation. Using micro data on urban households fro...

Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results

By Justin Wolfers

American Economic Review, December 2006

Applying the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from consent to unilateral divorce laws will not affect divorce rates. I show that existing evidence suggesting large effects of divorce laws on divorce rates reflect a failure to exp...

Self-Fulfilling Currency Crises: The Role of Interest Rates

By Christian Hellwig, Arijit Mukherji, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, December 2006

We develop a model of currency crises, in which traders are heterogeneously informed, and interest rates are endogenously determined in a noisy rational expectations equilibrium. In our model, multiple equilibria result from distinct roles an interest ...

Crises and Prices: Information Aggregation, Multiplicity, and Volatility

By George-Marios Angeletos and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, December 2006

Crises are volatile times when endogenous sources of information are closely monitored. We study the role of information in crises by introducing a financial market in a coordination game with imperfect information. The asset price aggregates dispersed...

In the Right Place at the Wrong Time: The Role of Firms and Luck in Young Workers' Careers

By Till von Wachter and Stefan Bender

American Economic Review, December 2006

We examine administrative data on young German workers and their employers to study the long-term effects of an early career job loss. To account for nonrandom sorting of workers into firms with different turnover rates and for selective job mobility, ...

Incentives and Prosocial Behavior

By Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, December 2006

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or image-related) create doubt about the true motive fo...

The Hidden Costs of Control

By Armin Falk and Michael Kosfeld

American Economic Review, December 2006

We analyze the consequences of control on motivation in an experimental principalagent game, where the principal can control the agent by implementing a minimum performance requirement before the agent chooses a productive activity. Our results show th...