The Coming Global Climate-Technology Revolution

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Scott Barrett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases can be reduced significantly using existing technologies, but stabilizing concentrations will require a technological revolution--a "revolution" because it will require fundamental change, achieved within a rela...

A Theory of Crowdfunding: A Mechanism Design Approach with Demand Uncertainty and Moral Hazard

By Roland Strausz

American Economic Review, June 2017

Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under aggregate demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost information threatens...

Technological Innovations, Downside Risk, and the Modernization of Agriculture

By Kyle Emerick, Alain de Janvry, Elisabeth Sadoulet, and Manzoor H. Dar

American Economic Review, June 2016

We use a randomized experiment in India to show that improved technology enhances agricultural productivity by crowding in modern inputs and cultivation practices. Specifically, we show that a new rice variety that reduces downside risk by providing flood...

Group Identity and Social Preferences

By Yan Chen and Sherry Xin Li

American Economic Review, March 2009

We present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of induced group identity on social preferences. We find that when participants are matched with an ingroup member, they show a 47 percent increase in charity concerns and a 93 percent decrea...

Cooperation in a Dynamic Fishing Game: A Framed Field Experiment

By Charles N. Noussair, Daan van Soest, and Jan Stoop

American Economic Review, May 2015

We derive a dynamic theoretical model of renewable resource extraction. In the social optimum, maximum extraction occurs in the last period only, while in the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, the resource is depleted immediately. The predictions a...

US 2050 Call for Proposals

[News]

December 14, 2017

The US 2050 initiative is offering grants for individual papers; proposals are due by January 22, 2018

Markup and Cost Dispersion across Firms: Direct Evidence from Producer Surveys in Pakistan

By David Atkin, Azam Chaudhry, Shamyla Chaudhry, Amit K. Khandelwal, and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review, May 2015

Researchers typically invoke theoretical assumptions to estimate mark-ups. Instead, we directly obtain mark-ups by surveying Pakistani soccer-ball producers. We document six facts: (i) Mark-ups are more dispersed than costs; (ii) Mark-ups and costs increa...

Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?

By Susanto Basu, John G. Fernald, and Miles S. Kimball

American Economic Review, December 2006

Yes. We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for aggregation effects, varying utilization of capital and labor, nonconstant returns, and imperfect competition. On impact, when technology improves, input use and nonresidential...

Do Economists Make Bad Citizens?

By Robert H. Frank, Thomas D. Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

Although field experiments and classroom surveys are ambiguous about whether economists are less likely than others to cooperate in social dilemmas, three important points remain clear: economics training encourages the view that people are motivated prim...

Retrospectives: Lange and von Mises, Large-Scale Enterprises, and the Economic Case for Socialism

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

In the debates over "economic calculation" launched by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and extending well into the 1940s, the central issue concerned the ability of a socialist economy to achieve allocative efficiency. Von Mises emphasized that a collectivist st...

Knowledge and Equilibrium in Games

[Symposium: Common Knowledge]

By Adam Brandenburger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1992

This paper describes an approach to noncooperative game theory that aims to capture considerations that exercise the minds of real-world strategists. The most commonly used tool of noncooperative game theory is the Nash equilibrium. This raises the questi...

Investment and Hysteresis

By Avinash Dixit

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

It seems that firms behave contrary to the standard economic theory of investment. We observe that firms do not invest as soon a price rises above long-run average cost; instead firms wait until price rises substantially above long-run average cost. On th...

Recall and Unemployment

By Shigeru Fujita and Giuseppe Moscarini

American Economic Review, December 2017

We document in the Survey of Income and Program Participation covering the period 1990–2013 that a surprisingly large share of workers return to their previous employer after a jobless spell, and experience very different unemployment and employment...

Spontaneous Order

[Symposium: Social Norms]

By Robert Sugden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

In a fishing village on the Yorkshire coast, there used to be an unwritten rule about the gathering of driftwood after a storm. Whoever was first onto a stretch of the shore after high tide was allowed to take whatever he wished without interference from ...

The Microfinance Promise

By Jonathan Morduch

Journal of Economic Literature, December 1999

In the past decade, microfinance programs have demonstrated that it is possible to lend to low-income households while maintaining high repayment rates--even without requiring collateral. The programs promise a revolution in approaches to alleviating pove...

Did Bankruptcy Reform Cause Mortgage Defaults to Rise?

By Wenli Li, Michelle J. White, and Ning Zhu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

Homeowners in financial distress can use bankruptcy to avoid defaulting on their mortgages, since filing loosens their budget constraints. But the 2005 bankruptcy reform made bankruptcy less favorable to homeowners and therefore caused mortgage defaults t...

Peers, Neighborhoods, and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy

By Olof Åslund, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson, and Hans Grönqvist

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

We examine to what extent immigrant school performance is affected by the characteristics of the neighborhoods that they grow up in. We address this issue using a refugee placement policy that provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residenc...

Gender-Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores

By Alberto Alesina, Andrea Ichino, and Loukas Karabarbounis

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

Gender-based taxation (GBT ) satisfies Ramsey's rule because it taxes at a lower rate the more elastic labor supply of women. We study GBT in a model in which labor elasticities emerge endogenously from intrahousehold bargaining. We explore the cases of ...

Are Economists Different, and If So, Why?

By John R. Carter and Michael D. Irons

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

Do economists behave differently from noneconomists? Some evidence suggests they do. In a well-known 1981 study in the Journal of Public Economics, Gerald Marwell and Ruth E. Ames found that free riding was significantly greater among a group of economics...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2016