Using Field Experiments to Test Equivalence between Auction Formats: Magic on the Internet

By David Lucking-Reiley

American Economic Review, December 1999

William Vickrey's predicted equivalences between first-price sealed-bid and Dutch auctions, and between second-price sealed-bid and English auctions, are tested using field experiments that auctioned off collectible trading cards over the Internet. The re...

Social Organizations, Violence, and Modern Growth

By Avner Greif and Murat Iyigun

American Economic Review, May 2013

Social institutions were often founded by the elite to avoid social upheavals. Institutions helped mitigate the threat of violent social responses to labor-saving innovations. But their organizational forms were influenced by preexisting cultural and soci...

Aid, Policies, and Growth: Comment

By William Easterly, Ross Levine, and David Roodman

American Economic Review, June 2004

Investment under Uncertainty with Strategic Debt Service

By Suresh Sundaresan and Neng Wang

American Economic Review, May 2007

Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820-1992

By François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson

American Economic Review, September 2002

This paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries. The estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to World War II and after that se...

Who Should Buy Long-Term Bonds?

By John Y. Campbell and LuisM. Viceira

American Economic Review, March 2001

According to conventional wisdom, long-term bonds are appropriate for conservative long-term investors. This paper develops a model of optimal consumption and portfolio choice for infinite-lived investors with recursive utility who face stochastic interes...

Proximity and Production Fragmentation

By Robert C. Johnson and Guillermo Noguera

American Economic Review, May 2012

Cross-border production chains tend to include geographically proximate countries. This suggests that increases in fragmentation should be largest among nearby trading partners, and thus may serve to localize gross trade. Using data on gross and value add...

The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy: Using the Future Elderly Model to Estimate Implications for Social Security and Medicare

By Dana P. Goldman and Peter R. Orszag

American Economic Review, May 2014

Mortality gradients by education and income have been rising in the United States and elsewhere. However, their impact on Social Security progressivity has received relatively little attention, and the impact on Medicare has received effectively none. Thi...

Dividend Taxation and Corporate Governance

By Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

In 2003, the United States enacted a tax reform that reduced, but did not eliminate, individual dividend income taxes. Cutting the dividend tax deprives corporate insiders of a justification for retaining earnings to build unprofitable corporate empires. ...

The Misallocation of Housing Under Rent Control

By Edward L. Glaeser and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Review, September 2003

The standard analysis of price controls assumes that goods are efficiently allocated, even when there are shortages. But if shortages mean that goods are randomly allocated across the consumers that want them, the welfare costs from misallocation may be g...

Equality, Efficiency, and Market Fundamentals: The Dynamics of International Medical-Care Reform

By David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2002

Public opinion surveys uniformly show low support for medical-care systems in developed countries. The longstanding conflict between equal access to care and efficient service provision partly explains this dissatisfaction. But the trade-off is particular...

Does Increasing Women's Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation?

By Jere R. Behrman and Mark R. Rosenzweig

American Economic Review, March 2002

Child-Adoption Matching: Preferences for Gender and Race

By Mariagiovanna Baccara, Allan Collard-Wexler, Leonardo Felli, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

This paper uses a new dataset on child-adoption matching to estimate the preferences of potential adoptive parents over US-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption. We identify significant preferences favoring girls and against African American ...

Naked Exclusion, Efficient Breach, and Downstream Competition

By John Simpson and Abraham L. Wickelgren

American Economic Review, September 2007

Previous papers by Eric B. Rasmusen, J. Mark Ramseyer, and John S. Wiley, Jr. (1991) and Ilya R. Segal and Michael D. Whinston (2000) argue that exclusive contracts can inefficiently deter entry in the presence of scale economies and multiple buyers. W...

Evolution and Intelligent Design

By Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Review, March 2008

Who Will Fight? The All-Volunteer Army after 9/11

By Susan Payne Carter, Alexander A. Smith, and Carl Wojtaszek

American Economic Review, May 2017

Who fought the War on Terror? We find that as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan progressed, there was an increase in the fraction of active-duty Army enlistees who were white or from high-income neighborhoods and that these two groups selected combat occup...

Nature versus Nurture: The Environment's Persistent Influence through the Modernization of American Agriculture

By Richard Hornbeck

American Economic Review, May 2012

Technological innovation in agriculture was substantial during the 20th century. Is "modern" technological control of the environment replacing a "primitive" dependency on natural advantages and disadvantages, or has agricultural production remained pers...

Comments on the Market Crash: Six Months After

[Symposium: Brady Commission Report on the October 1987 Stock Market Crash]

By Hayne Leland and Mark Rubinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

Six months after the market crash of October 1987, we are still sifting through the debris searching for its cause. Two theories of the crash sound plausible -- one based on a market panic and the other based on large trader transactions -- though there i...

Increasing Income Inequality, External Habits, and Self-Reported Happiness

By Karen E. Dynan and Enrichetta Ravina

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Consumer Price Index: A Research Agenda and Three Proposals

[Symposium: Measuring the CPI]

By Robert A. Pollak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

This paper argues that dealing with current concerns about the CPI within the framework of economic theory requires developing the theory of the cost-of-living index under more general assumptions than have thus far been standard. It examines three neglec...