Collusion with Asymmetric Retailers: Evidence from a Gasoline Price-Fixing Case

By Robert Clark and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

We point out a fundamental difficulty of successfully colluding in retail markets with heterogeneous firms, and characterize the mechanism recent gasoline cartels in Canada used to sustain collusion. Heterogeneity in cost and network size necessitates...

Information Disclosure and Unraveling in Matching Markets

By Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets. A school may suppress some information about students in order to improve their average job placement. We consider a setting with many schools, students, and jobs, and show that if early cont...

An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Gap in Mathematics

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We document and analyze the emergence of a substantial gender gap in mathematics in the early years of schooling using a large, recent, and nationally representative panel of US children. There are no mean differences between boys and girls upon entry ...

Metals or Management? Explaining Africa's Recent Economic Growth Performance

By Laura N. Beny and Lisa D. Cook

American Economic Review, May 2009

Optimal Expectations and Limited Medical Testing: Evidence from Huntington Disease: Corrigendum

By Emily Oster, Ira Shoulson, and E. Ray Dorsey

American Economic Review, June 2016

Parental Education and Parental Time with Children

[Symposium: Investment in Children]

By Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst, and Melissa Kearney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one's children. Using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight some interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children: we f...

Evaluating a Simple Method for Estimating Black-White Gaps in Median Wages

By William Johnson, Yuichi Kitamura, and Derek Neal

American Economic Review, May 2000

Job Polarization in Europe

By Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Lewis Model: A 60-Year Retrospective

[Symposium: Classic Ideas in Development]

By Douglas Gollin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

The Lewis model has remained, for more than half a century, one of the dominant theories of development economics. This paper argues that the power of the model lies in the simplicity of its central insight: that poor countries contain enclaves of economi...

Preference Reversals of a Different Kind: The "More Is Less" Phenomenon

By John A. List

American Economic Review, December 2002

The Rise and Fall of Unions: The Public Sector and the Private

[Symposium: Explaining Savings]

By Melvin W. Reder

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

This paper has a single purpose: to explain why unionism (interpreted as percentage of union adherents among eligible employees) has been declining in the private sector for the past 30 to 35 years, but, for most of this period, has been increasing in the...

Interactions between Unmarried Fathers and Their Children: The Role of Paternity Establishment and Child-Support Policies

By Laura M. Argys and H. Elizabeth Peters

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Price of Gasoline and New Vehicle Fuel Economy: Evidence from Monthly Sales Data

By Thomas Klier and Joshua Linn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

This paper uses a unique dataset of monthly new vehicle sales by detailed model from 1978 to 2007, and implements a new identification strategy to estimate the effect of the price of gasoline on individual vehicle model sales. We control for unobserved ve...

The Voracity Effect

By Aaron Tornell and Philip R. Lane

American Economic Review, March 1999

The authors analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal-political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups. Powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate ca...

Minimum Wages and Earnings Inequality in Urban Mexico

By Mariano Bosch and Marco Manacorda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all of the growt...

Contingent Valuation: From Dubious to Hopeless

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By Jerry Hausman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Approximately 20 years ago, Peter Diamond and I wrote an article for this journal analyzing contingent valuation methods. At that time Peter's view was that contingent valuation was hopeless, while I was dubious but somewhat more optimistic. But 20 years ...

Incentives and Discrimination

By Eyal Winter

American Economic Review, June 2004

The Ethology of Homo Economicus

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

Early critics of John Stuart Mill attacked him for creating a monomaniacal economic man concerned only with the accumulation of money. In fact, Mill's construct possessed a considerably richer psychology including desires for leisure, luxury, and sexual r...

Making a Name: Women's Surnames at Marriage and Beyond

By Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

This paper tracks the fraction of college graduate women who kept their surnames upon marriage and after childbirth and explores some of the correlates of surname retention. Data from the New York Times, Harvard College alumni books, and Massachusetts bir...

The Role of Family in Family Firms

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Marianne Bertrand and Antoinette Schoar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

History is replete with examples of spectacular ascents of family businesses. Yet there are also numerous accounts of family businesses brought down by bitter feuds among family members, disappointed expectations between generations, and tragic sagas of l...