Market Microstructure and Intermediation

By Daniel F. Spulber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

This paper emphasizes the important role played by intermediaries in the economy, including wholesalers, retailers, and financial firms. The paper defines an intermediary as an economic agent that purchases from suppliers for resale to buyers or that help...

Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results

By Justin Wolfers

American Economic Review, December 2006

Applying the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from consent to unilateral divorce laws will not affect divorce rates. I show that existing evidence suggesting large effects of divorce laws on divorce rates reflect a failure to exp...

Markets: Continuity and Change in the International Diamond Market

By Debora L. Spar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The international diamond cartel, which presides over the production side of the industry, may be the most successful and longest-lasting cartel in the world. The dominant company in the industry, DeBeers, has been around since 1880 and has been controlle...

Access, Sorting, and Achievement: The Short-Run Effects of Free Primary Education in Kenya

By Adrienne M. Lucas and Isaac M. Mbiti

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

We examine the impact of the Kenyan Free Primary Education program on student participation, sorting, and achievement on the primary school exit examination. Exploiting variation in pre-program dropout rates between districts, we find that the program inc...

Optimal Monetary Policy in Open versus Closed Economies: An Integrated Approach

By Richard Clarida, Jordi Gali, and Mark Gertler

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Persistent Effect of Temporary Affirmative Action

By Conrad Miller

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

I estimate the dynamic effects of federal affirmative action regulation, exploiting variation in the timing of regulation and deregulation across work establishments. Affirmative action increases the black share of employees over time: in 5 years after an...

The Effects of Social Networks on Employment and Inequality

By Antoni Calvó-Armengol and Matthew O. Jackson

American Economic Review, June 2004

We develop a model where agents obtain information about job opportunities through an explicitly modeled network of social contacts. We show that employment is positively correlated across time and agents. Moreover, unemployment exhibits duration dependen...

Clubs with Entrapment

By Avinash Dixit

American Economic Review, December 2003

The Macroeconomics of Trend Inflation

By Guido Ascari and Argia M. Sbordone

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2014

Most macroeconomic models for monetary policy analysis are approximated around a zero inflation steady state, but most central banks target an inflation rate of about 2 percent. Many economists have recently proposed even higher inflation targets to reduc...

The Effects of Lottery Prizes on Winners and Their Neighbors: Evidence from the Dutch Postcode Lottery

By Peter Kuhn, Peter Kooreman, Adriaan Soetevent, and Arie Kapteyn

American Economic Review, August 2011

Each week, the Dutch Postcode Lottery (PCL) randomly selects a postal code, and distributes cash and a new BMW to lottery participants in that code. We study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors. Consistent with the life-cycl...

Early Childhood Education Programs

By Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

This paper discusses early childhood education programs: their goals; effectiveness; optimal timing, targeting, and content; and costs and benefits. Early intervention has significant short- and medium-term benefits: most notably it reduces grade repetiti...

Two Pillars of Asset Pricing

By Eugene F. Fama

American Economic Review, June 2014

Russian Retrospectives on Reforms from Yeltsin to Putin

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Padma Desai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

The kamikaze crew of liberal reformers, picked by former President Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s, succeeded in overturning the planned economy and the authoritarian political arrangements of seven decades of Soviet Communism. However, the resulting bre...

Multidimensional Platform Design

By André Veiga, E. Glen Weyl, and Alexander White

American Economic Review, May 2017

Successful platforms attract not just many users, but also those of the right kind. 'The right kind of user' is one who can either be directly monetized or who differentially attracts other valuable users. Bonacich centrality on the network of user sortin...

To Float or to Fix: Evidence on the Impact of Exchange Rate Regimes on Growth

By Eduardo Levy-Yeyati and Federico Sturzenegger

American Economic Review, September 2003

We study the relationship between exchange rate regimes and economic growth for a sample of 183 countries over the post-Bretton Woods period, using a new de facto classification of regimes based on the actual behavior of the relevant macroeconomic variabl...

Women in the Labor Market and in the Family

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By James P. Smith and Michael Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

There are two themes in this paper. First, we argue that the conventional wisdom of an absence of any substantial labor market progress for women is mistaken. Instead, throughout this century, women's wages have been steadily rising relative to those of m...

Trumping Norms: Lab Evidence on Aggressive Communication before and after the 2016 US Presidential Election

By Jennie Huang and Corinne Low

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper provides evidence from a negotiation experiment that the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump had a profound impact on individual behavior in the lab. Using a Battle of the Sexes game with unstructured communication, we find that post-...

Religion and Economy

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

Religion has a two-way interaction with political economy. With religion viewed as a dependent variable, a central question is how economic development and political institutions affect religious participation and beliefs. With religion viewed as an indep...

Field Experiments with Firms

[Symposium: Field Experiments]

By Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay, and Imran Rasul

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long-standing research questions relating to firm behavior. We present insights from two classes of experiments—within and across firms—and draw common lessons from both sets. Field ex...

The Effect of Bottle Laws on Income: New Empirical Results

By Bevin Ashenmiller

American Economic Review, May 2011

Eleven US states have "bottle laws," deposit-refund programs that combine a consumption tax with a recycling rebate. When states set the bottle deposit low enough it becomes a tax on high wage earners, for whom the opportunity cost of their time prevents ...