State-Owned and Privately Owned Firms: An Empirical Analysis of Profitability, Leverage, and Labor Intensity

By Kathryn L. DeWenter and Paul H. Malatesta

American Economic Review, March 2001

The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

American Economic Review, June 2005

The rise of Western Europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean and with substantial trade with the New World, Africa, and Asia via the Atlantic. This trade and the associated colonialism affected Europe not o...

Why Do Firms in Developing Countries Have Low Productivity?

By Nicholas Bloom, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie, and John Roberts

American Economic Review, May 2010

Auctions with Resale Markets: An Application to U.S. Forest Service Timber Sales

By Philip A. Haile

American Economic Review, June 2001

When bidders anticipate an opportunity for resale trade, the value of winning an auction is determined in part by the option values of buying and selling in the secondary market. One implication is that a bidder's willingness to pay at an auction increase...

Learning and Forgetting: The Dynamics of Aircraft Production

By C. Lanier Benkard

American Economic Review, September 2000

Explaining Changes in Female Labor Supply in a Life-Cycle Model

By Orazio Attanasio, Hamish Low, and Virginia Sánchez-Marcos

American Economic Review, September 2008

This paper studies the life-cycle labor supply of three cohorts of American women, born in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. We focus on the increase in labor supply of mothers between the 1940s and 1950s cohorts. We construct a lifecycle model of female pa...

Water Quality Violations and Avoidance Behavior: Evidence from Bottled Water Consumption

By Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Neidell, and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, May 2011

We examine the impact of poor water quality on avoidance behavior by estimating the change in bottled water purchases in response to drinking water violations. Using data from a national grocery chain matched with water quality violations, we find an incr...

Wage Shocks and North American Labor-Market Integration

By Raymond Robertson

American Economic Review, September 2000

This study uses household-level data from the United States and Mexico to examine labor-market integration. I consider how the effects of shocks and rates of convergence to an equilibrium differential are affected by borders, geography, and demographics. ...

Fair Shares: Accountability and Cognitive Dissonance in Allocation Decisions

By James Konow

American Economic Review, September 2000

House Prices, Home Equity-Based Borrowing, and the US Household Leverage Crisis

By Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

American Economic Review, August 2011

Borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners was responsible for a significant fraction of the rise in US household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and the increase in defaults from 2006 to 2008. Instrumental variables estimation shows ...

Mismatch Unemployment

By Ayşegül Şahin, Joseph Song, Giorgio Topa, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, November 2014

We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in U.S....

Building Routines: Learning, Cooperation, and the Dynamics of Incomplete Relational Contracts

By Sylvain Chassang

American Economic Review, March 2010

This paper studies how agents with conflicting interests learn to cooperate when the details of cooperation are not common knowledge. It considers a repeated game in which one player has incomplete information about when and how her partner can provide...

Technological Change and the Stock Market

By John Laitner and Dmitriy Stolyarov

American Economic Review, September 2003

Tobin's average q has usually been well above 1, but fell below 1 during 1974-1984. Our model explains this pattern and reconciles it with unchanging aggregate investment. The stock market value in the numerator of q reflects ownership of physical capital...

Large-Scale Affirmative Action in School Choice: Admissions to IITs in India

By Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan

American Economic Review, May 2017

We provide a real-life application of a large scale affirmative action policy in school choice in the context of engineering school admissions in India where students not only care about what program they are matched to but also what type of seat category...

Money in a Theory of Banking

By Douglas W. Diamond and Raghuram G. Rajan

American Economic Review, March 2006

We examine the role of banks in the transmission of monetary policy. In economies where banks use real demand deposits to finance their lending, fluctuations in the timing of production can force banks to scramble for real liquidity, or even fail, which c...

Beyond GDP: The Quest for a Measure of Social Welfare

By Marc Fleurbaey

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

This paper critically examines the various approaches to the measurement of individual well-being and social welfare that have been considered for the construction of alternatives to GDP. Special attention is devoted to recent developments in the analys...

Sustaining Production Chains through Financial Linkages

By Se-Jik Kim and Hyun Song Shin

American Economic Review, May 2012

The technological constraints on sustaining production chains have been discussed extensively by development economists, but the role of financial linkages has received less attention. In a model of recursive moral hazard for a manufacturing supply chain,...

Inequality, Lobbying, and Resource Allocation

By Joan Esteban and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, March 2006

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They ...

Veto Constraint in Mechanism Design: Inefficiency with Correlated Types

By Olivier Compte and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2009

We consider bargaining problems in which parties have access to outside options, the size of the pie is commonly known and each party privately knows the realization of her outside option. We allow for correlations in the distributions of outside optio...

The Rise of the Regulatory State

By Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2003

The Progressive Era of the early twentieth-century U.S. saw significant growth of government regulation of business. We model the choice of law enforcement strategy between private litigation over accidents, regulation of precautions, a combination of the...