Optimal Allocation with Ex Post Verification and Limited Penalties

By Tymofiy Mylovanov and Andriy Zapechelnyuk

American Economic Review, September 2017

Several agents with privately known social values compete for a prize. The prize is allocated based on the claims of the agents, and the winner is subject to a limited penalty if he makes a false claim. If the number of agents is large, the optimal mechan...

Taking Stock: A Critical Assessment of Recent Research on Inventories

By Alan S. Blinder and Louis J. Maccini

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s. No one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories. Macroeconomists rout...

The Effect of Credit Constraints on the College Drop-Out Decision: A Direct Approach Using a New Panel Study

By Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd Stinebrickner

American Economic Review, December 2008

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This paper differentiates itself from previous wor...

Offshoring, Transition, and Training: Evidence from Danish Matched Worker-Firm Data

By David Hummels, Jakob R. Munch, Lars Skipper, and Chong Xiang

American Economic Review, May 2012

We combine matched Danish worker-firm-trade data with detailed individual-worker training data. We find: 1) workers displaced from offshoring firms take up more vocational-training and have a harder time getting re-attached to the labor-force than other d...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Insurer-Provider Networks in the Medical Care Market

By Katherine Ho

American Economic Review, March 2009

I use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers. I include a simple profit-maximization framework and an additional effect: hospitals that can secur...

Optimal Taxation and Debt with Uninsurable Risks to Human Capital Accumulation

By Piero Gottardi, Atsushi Kajii, and Tomoyuki Nakajima

American Economic Review, November 2015

We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation and analyze the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of government debt. We show that in the presence o...

News-Driven Business Cycles: Insights and Challenges

By Paul Beaudry and Franck Portier

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in...

The Impact of Computation Time and Experience on Decision Values

By K. Carrie Armel and Antonio Rangel

American Economic Review, May 2008

One Chance in a Million: Altruism and the Bone Marrow Registry

By Theodore C. Bergstrom, Rodney J. Garratt, and Damien Sheehan-Connor

American Economic Review, September 2009

Stem cell transplants save lives of many patients with blood diseases. Donation is painful, but rarely has lasting adverse effects. Patients can accept transplants only from donors with compatible immune systems. Those lacking a sibling match must seek...

Income Inequality, Mobility, and Turnover at the Top in the US, 1987-2010

By Gerald Auten, Geoffrey Gee, and Nicholas Turner

American Economic Review, May 2013

While cross-sectional data show increasing income inequality in the United States, it is also important to examine how incomes change over time. Using income tax data, this paper provides new evidence on long-term and intergenerational mobility, and persi...

What Mean Impacts Miss: Distributional Effects of Welfare Reform Experiments

By Marianne P. Bitler, Jonah B. Gelbach, and Hilary W. Hoynes

American Economic Review, September 2006

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using randomassign...

A Dynamic Economy with Costly Price Adjustments

By Leif Danziger

American Economic Review, September 1999

This paper studies a general-equilibrium model of a dynamic economy with menu costs. Each firm's productivity is exposed to idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks around a trend, and the money supply to monetary shocks around a trend. All consump...

Accounting for Crises

By Venky Nagar and Gwen Yu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

We provide among the first empirical evidence, consistent with recent macro global game crisis models, that shows that the precision of public signals can coordinate crises. In these models, self-fulfilling crises independent of fundamentals can occur onl...

The Future of Microeconomic Theory

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of Economics]

By Beth Allen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

The question of what constitutes good economic theory is analyzed. Current good and bad aspects of its methodologies are discussed. Interdisciplinary work that goes beyond the social sciences is advocated. The future predictions are presented concerning r...

Trade, Tragedy, and the Commons

By Brian R. Copeland and M. Scott Taylor

American Economic Review, June 2009

We develop a theory of resource management where the degree to which countries escape the tragedy of the commons, and hence the de facto property rights regime, is endogenously determined. Three forces determine success or failure in resource managemen...

Global Interest Rates, Currency Returns, and the Real Value of the Dollar

By Charles Engel and Kenneth D. West

American Economic Review, May 2010

After Midnight: A Regression Discontinuity Design in Length of Postpartum Hospital Stays

By Douglas Almond and Joseph J. Doyle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Estimates of moral hazard in health insurance markets can be confounded by adverse selection. This paper considers a plausibly exogenous source of variation in insurance coverage for childbirth in California. We find that additional health insurance cover...

Consumers' Response to State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Programs

By Sébastien Houde and Joseph E. Aldy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

Through an evaluation of the 2009 Recovery Act's State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Program, this paper examines consumers' response to energy efficiency rebates. The analysis shows that 70 percent of consumers claiming a rebate were inframarginal an...

The London Congestion Charge

By Jonathan Leape

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

By the 1990s, the average speed of trips across London was below that at the beginning of the twentieth century -- before the car was introduced -- and by the end of that decade, public concern over levels of traffic congestion was high. In early 2003, Lo...