Search, Design, and Market Structure

By Heski Bar-Isaac, Guillermo Caruana, and Vicente Cuñat

American Economic Review, April 2012

The Internet has made consumer search easier, with consequences for prices, industry structure, and the kinds of products offered. We provide an industry model with strategic design choices that explores these issues. A polarized market structure results:...

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...

The Young Economist's Guide to Professional Etiquette

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

Nearly all advanced graduate students and new assistant professors demonstrate naivety in their nonsubstantive professional dealings. Graduate programs in economics offer courses that lead to written drafts of important research; they teach little about h...

R&D Cooperation and Spillovers: Some Empirical Evidence from Belgium

By Bruno Cassiman and Reinhilde Veugelers

American Economic Review, September 2002

Career, Family, and the Well-Being of College-Educated Women

By Marianne Bertrand

American Economic Review, May 2013

I report on measures of life satisfaction and emotional well-being across groups of college-educated women, based on whether they have a career, a family, both, or neither. The biggest premium to life satisfaction is associated with having a family. While...

Frictional Wage Dispersion in Search Models: A Quantitative Assessment

By Andreas Hornstein, Per Krusell, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, December 2011

We propose a new measure of frictional wage dispersion: the mean-min wage ratio. For a large class of search models, we show that this measure is independent of the wage-offer distribution but depends on statistics of labor-market turnover and on preferen...

Performance Pay and Teachers' Effort, Productivity, and Grading Ethics

By Victor Lavy

American Economic Review, December 2009

This paper presents evidence about the effect of individual monetary incentives on English and math teachers in Israel. Teachers were rewarded with cash bonuses for improving their students' performance in high-school matriculation exams. The main iden...

Is Modern Technology Responsible for Jobless Recoveries?

By Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

American Economic Review, May 2017

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. We study recoveries from 71 recessio...

Comments

By Russell S. Sobel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

Estimating Sovereign Default Risk

By Huixin Bi and Nora Traum

American Economic Review, May 2012

This paper uses Bayesian methods to estimate the sovereign default probability for Greece and Italy in the post-EMU period. We build a real business cycle model that allows for interactions among fiscal policy instruments, sovereign default risk, and a "f...

Crowdsourcing City Government: Using Tournaments to Improve Inspection Accuracy

By Edward L. Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers, and Michael Luca

American Economic Review, May 2016

The proliferation of big data makes it possible to better target city services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities could hire consultants, but a cheaper alterna...

The Role of the Family in Immigrants' Labor-Market Activity: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations: Comment

By Francine D. Blau, Lawrence M. Kahn, Joan Y. Moriarty, and Andre Portela Souza

American Economic Review, March 2003

Estimation and Inference of Impulse Responses by Local Projections

By Òscar Jordà

American Economic Review, March 2005

This paper introduces methods to compute impulse responses without specification and estimation of the underlying multivariate dynamic system. The central idea consists in estimating local projections at each period of interest rather than extrapolating i...

Strategy-Proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, December 2009

The design of the New York City (NYC) high school match involved trade-offs among efficiency, stability, and strategy-proofness that raise new theoretical questions. We analyze a model with indifferences -- ties -- in school preferences. Simulations wi...

Transaction Cost Economics: The Natural Progression

By Oliver E. Williamson

American Economic Review, June 2010

The Hidden Advantage of Delegation: Pareto Improvements in a Gift Exchange Game

By Gary Charness, Ramón Cobo-Reyes, Natalia Jiménez, Juan A. Lacomba, and Francisco Lagos

American Economic Review, August 2012

This paper analyzes the effect on performance and earnings of delegating the wage choice to employees. Our results show that such delegation significantly increases effort levels. Moreover, we observe a Pareto improvement, as the earnings of both employer...

Constitutional Rules and Fiscal Policy Outcomes

By Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, March 2004

We investigate the effect of electoral rules and forms of government on fiscal policy outcomes in a large sample of democracies. We rely on different estimation methods to address prospective problems of statistical inference, due to nonrandom selection o...

Behavioral Contract Theory

By Botond Koszegi

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

This review provides a critical survey of psychology-and-economics ("behavioral-economics") research in contract theory. First, I introduce the theories of individual decision making most frequently used in behavioral contract theory, and formally illustr...

What Do Emissions Markets Deliver and to Whom? Evidence from Southern California's NOx Trading Program

By Meredith Fowlie, Stephen P. Holland, and Erin T. Mansur

American Economic Review, April 2012

An advantage of cap-and-trade programs over more prescriptive environmental regulation is that compliance flexibility and cost effectiveness can make more stringent emissions reductions politically feasible. However, when markets (versus regulators) deter...

Inflation and Unemployment in the Long Run

By Aleksander Berentsen, Guido Menzio, and Randall Wright

American Economic Review, February 2011

We study the long-run relation between money (inflation or interest rates) and unemployment. We document positive relationships between these variables at low frequencies. We develop a framework where money and unemployment are modeled using explicit micr...