The Online Advertising Industry: Economics, Evolution, and Privacy

[Symposium: Internet Economics]

By David S. Evans

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009

Online advertising accounts for almost 9 percent of all advertising in the United States. This share is expected to increase as more media is consumed over the Internet and as more advertisers shift spending to online technologies. The expansion of Intern...

Was Development Assistance a Mistake?

By William Easterly

American Economic Review, May 2007

From Efficient Markets Theory to Behavioral Finance

[Symposium: Financial Market Efficiency]

By Robert J. Shiller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

The efficient markets theory reached the height of its dominance in academic circles around the 1970s. Faith in this theory was eroded by a succession of discoveries of anomalies, many in the 1980s, and of evidence of excess volatility of returns. Finance...

Valuing Consumer Products by the Time Spent Using Them: An Application to the Internet

By Austan Goolsbee and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, May 2006

Managing Growth to Achieve Efficient Coordination in Large Groups

By Roberto A. Weber

American Economic Review, March 2006

Previous experiments using the minimum-effort coordination game reveal a striking regularity—large groups never coordinate efficiently. Given the frequency with which large real-world groups, such as firms, face similarly difficult coordination problems...

Can a Representative-Agent Model Represent a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy

By Sungbae An, Yongsung Chang, and Sun-Bin Kim

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors. In order to reconcile theory with da...

The Theory of the Firm as Governance Structure: From Choice to Contract

By Oliver E. Williamson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

The propositions that organization matters and that it is susceptible to analysis were long greeted by skepticism by economists. One reason why this message took a long time to register is that it is much easier to say that organization matters than it is...

Gender Differences in Pay

[Symposium: Women and the Labor Market]

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

We consider the gender pay gap in the United States. Both gender-specific factors, including gender differences in qualifications and discrimination, and overall wage structure, the rewards for skills and employment in particular sectors, importantly infl...

Trade Liberalization and Poverty: The Evidence So Far

By L. Alan Winters, Neil McCulloch, and Andrew McKay

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2004

This paper assesses the current state of evidence on the impact of trade policy reform on poverty in developing countries. There is little empirical evidence addressing this question directly, but a lot of related evidence on specific aspects. We summariz...

Microfinance Games

By Xavier Giné, Pamela Jakiela, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Morduch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Microfinance banks use group-based lending contracts to strengthen borrowers' incentives for diligence, but the contracts are vulnerable to free-riding and collusion. We systematically unpack microfinance mechanisms through ten experimental games played ...

The Redistributional Impact of Nonlinear Electricity Pricing

By Severin Borenstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

Electricity regulators often mandate increasing-block pricing (IBP)—i.e., marginal price increases with the customer's average daily usage—to protect low-income households from rising costs. IBP has no cost basis, raising a classic conflict be...

Political Regimes and Economic Growth

[Symposium: Democracy and Development]

By Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

Does democracy in the political realm foster or hinder economic growth? Our discussion of this question begins with a review of arguments in favor of, and against, democracy. Then we summarize statistical studies in which political regime is included amon...

Trade Adjustment and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from Indian Tariff Reform

By Eric V. Edmonds, Nina Pavcnik, and Petia Topalova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

Does trade policy influence schooling and child labor in low-income countries? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. While schooling increased and child labor declined in rural India in the 1990s, these trends are attenua...

Consumption Responses to In-Kind Transfers: Evidence from the Introduction of the Food Stamp Program

By Hilary W. Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2009

Economists have strong theoretical predictions about how in-kind transfers, such as providing vouchers for food, impact consumption. Despite the prominence of the theory, there is little empirical work on responses to in-kind transfers, and most existi...

Tranching, CDS, and Asset Prices: How Financial Innovation Can Cause Bubbles and Crashes

By Ana Fostel and John Geanakoplos

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage bubble and then to the crash of 2007-2009. We show why tranching and leverage first raised asset prices and why CDS lowered them afterward. This may seem puzzling, since...

From Divergence to Convergence: Reevaluating the History behind China's Economic Boom

By Loren Brandt, Debin Ma, and Thomas G. Rawski

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2014

China's long-term economic dynamics pose a formidable challenge to economic historians. The Qing Empire (1644-1911), the world's largest national economy before 1800, experienced a tripling of population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wit...

The Optimal Conduct of Monetary Policy with Interest on Reserves

By Anil K. Kashyap and Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

In a world with interest on reserves, the central bank has two distinct tools that it can use to raise the short-term policy rate: it can either increase the interest it pays on reserve balances, or it can reduce the quantity of reserves in the system. We...

Central Bank Communication and Expectations Stabilization

By Stefano Eusepi and Bruce Preston

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

The value of communication is analyzed in a model in which agents' expectations need not be consistent with central bank policy. Without communication, the Taylor principle is not sufficient for macroeconomic stability: divergent learning dynamics are pos...

Iodine Deficiency and Schooling Attainment in Tanzania

By Erica Field, Omar Robles, and Maximo Torero

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2009

Cognitive damage from iodine deficiency disorders (IDD) has important implications for economic growth through its effect on human capital. To gauge the magnitude of this influence, we evaluate the impact on schooling of reductions in IDD from intensiv...

Teacher Testing, Teacher Education, and Teacher Characteristics

By Joshua D. Angrist and Jonathan Guryan

American Economic Review, May 2004