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 ...

Macroeconomic Effects of Bankruptcy and Foreclosure Policies

By Kurt Mitman

American Economic Review, August 2016

I study the implications of two major debt-relief policies in the United States: the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) and the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). To do so, I develop a model of housing and default that...

The Risk Premium for Equity: Implications for the Proposed Diversification of the Social Security Fund

By Simon Grant and John Quiggin

American Economic Review, September 2002

Democratic Capital: The Nexus of Political and Economic Change

By Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

We study the dynamics of economic and political change, theoretically and empirically. Democratic capital measured by a nation's historical experience with democracy, and the incidence of democracy in its neighborhood, appears to reduce exit rates from...

Uncoupled Dynamics Do Not Lead to Nash Equilibrium

By Sergiu Hart and Andreu Mas-Colell

American Economic Review, December 2003

Checkmate: Exploring Backward Induction among Chess Players

By Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, and Sally E. Sadoff

American Economic Review, April 2011

Although backward induction is a cornerstone of game theory, most laboratory experiments have found that agents are not able to successfully backward induct. We analyze the play of world-class chess players in the centipede game, which is ill-suited for t...

How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists

By Joshua S. Gans and George B. Shepherd

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

The authors asked the world's leading economists to describe instances in which journals rejected their articles. More than sixty essays, by a broadly diverse group that includes fifteen Nobel Prize winners, indicate that most have suffered publication re...

What Explains the Industrial Revolution in East Asia? Evidence From the Factor Markets

By Chang-Tai Hsieh

American Economic Review, June 2002

This paper presents dual estimates of total factor productivity growth (TFPG) for East Asian countries. While the dual estimates of TFPG for Korea and Hong Kong are similar to the primal estimates, they exceed the primal estimates by 1 percent a year for ...

Economic Puzzles: Noisy Prisoners, Manhattan Locations, and More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

Each "Puzzles" will begin with a few speed problems. These puzzles have answers provided in the same issue. Puzzles 1 and 2 will give you a chance to get up to speed. Then, we continue with longer puzzles taken from two very broadly defined categories: st...

Is Reputation Good or Bad? An Experiment

By Brit Grosskopf and Rajiv Sarin

American Economic Review, December 2010

We investigate the impact of reputation in a laboratory experiment. We do so by varying whether the past choices of a long-run player are observable by the short-run players. Our framework allows for reputation to have either a beneficial or a harmful ef...

Do We Underestimate the Benefits of Cultural Competition?

By Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen

American Economic Review, May 2004

Does It Pay to Know Prices in Health Care?

By Ethan M. J. Lieber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Consumers rarely know the price of medical care before they consume it. I use variation in the timing of access to a new source of price information to show how access to and search for price information leads consumers to pay significantly less for care....

Fiscal Volatility Shocks and Economic Activity

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Pablo Guerrón-Quintana, Keith Kuester, and Juan Rubio-Ramírez

American Economic Review, November 2015

We study how unexpected changes in uncertainty about fiscal policy affect economic activity. First, we estimate tax and spending processes for the United States with time-varying volatility to uncover evidence of time-varying volatility. Second, we estima...

Leverage Cycles and the Anxious Economy

By Ana Fostel and John Geanakoplos

American Economic Review, September 2008

We provide a pricing theory for emerging asset classes, like emerging markets, that are not yet mature enough to be attractive to the general public. We show how leverage cycles can cause contagion, flight to collateral, and issuance rationing in a fre...

Horizontal Merger Policy: Problems and Changes

[Symposium: Horizontal Mergers and Antitrust]

By Richard Schmalensee

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

Most knowledgeable economists seem now to agree that the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the courts were excessively hostile to horizontal mergers in the 1960s. There also seems to be widespread agreement that the 1984 Merger Guid...

Capital Income Taxes with Heterogeneous Discount Rates

By Peter Diamond and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

With heterogeneity in both skills and discount factors, the Atkinson- Stiglitz theorem that savings should not be taxed does not hold. In a model with heterogeneity of preferences at each earnings level, introducing a savings tax on high earners or a sav...

Real Interest Rates and the Savings and Loan Crisis: The Moral Hazard Premium

By John B. Shoven, Scott B. Smart, and Joel Waldfogel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

Real interest rates shifted upwards by four or five percentage points in approximately 1980. The question is why. In this paper we review some of the more popular explanations and point out that they are somewhat inconsistent with the facts. We then prese...