A Model of Forum Shopping

By Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, September 2006

Owners of intellectual property or mere sponsors of an idea (e.g., authors, security issuers, sponsors of standards) resort to more or less independent certifiers to persuade potential users (buyers or adopters) of the worth of their property or idea. W...

Dynamics of Demand for Index Insurance: Evidence from a Long-Run Field Experiment

By Shawn Cole, Daniel Stein, and Jeremy Tobacman

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper estimates how experimentally-manipulated experiences with a novel financial product, rainfall index insurance, affect subsequent insurance demand. Using a seven-year panel, we develop three main findings. First, recent experience matters for de...

Pharmaceuticals in U.S. Health Care: Determinants of Quantity and Price

[Symposium: Pharmaceuticals]

By Ernst R. Berndt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has again become the focus of considerable controversy. In understanding the economics underlying this industry, distinctions between short, medium and long-run costs are critical, as is that between economic and accountin...

Negative Marginal Tax Rates and Heterogeneity

By Philippe Choné and Guy Laroque

American Economic Review, December 2010

Heterogeneity is an important determinant of the shape of optimal tax schemes. This is shown here in a model à la Mirrlees. The agents differ in their productivities and opportunity costs of work, but their labor supplies depend only on a given uni...

Conducting Monetary Policy at Very Low Short-Term Interest Rates

By Ben S. Bernanke and Vincent R. Reinhart

American Economic Review, May 2004

Bend Them but Don't Break Them: Passionate Workers, Skeptical Managers, and Decision Making in Organizations

By Omar A. Nayeem

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2017

This paper explores the useful but delicate role of managerial skepticism in hierarchical knowledge-based organizations. In these settings, the decision-maker principal seeks advice from managers, who instruct expert frontline workers to acquire informati...

The Central Role of Entrepreneurs in Transition Economies

By John McMillan and Christopher Woodruff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

The authors summarize entrepreneurial patterns in the transition economies, particularly Russia, China, Poland and Vietnam. Markets developed spontaneously in every transition country, but they were built at varying speeds. Some governments impeded the en...

Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Trade-Offs

By Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz, and Tommaso Valletti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers...

Making Case-Based Decision Theory Directly Observable

By Han Bleichrodt, Martin Filko, Amit Kothiyal, and Peter P. Wakker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

Case-based decision theory (CBDT) provided a new way of revealing preferences, with decisions under uncertainty determined by similarities with cases in memory. This paper introduces a method to measure CBDT that requires no commitment to parametric famil...

A Nation of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation and American History

By Edward L. Glaeser

American Economic Review, May 2013

The great housing convulsion that buffeted America between 2000 and 2010 has historical precedents, from the frontier land boom of the 1790s to the skyscraper craze of the 1920s. But this time was different. There was far less real uncertainty about funda...

Manipulability of Stable Mechanisms

By Peter Chen, Michael Egesdal, Marek Pycia, and M. Bumin Yenmez

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

We study the manipulability of stable matching mechanisms and show that manipulability comparisons are equivalent to preference comparisons: for any agent, a mechanism is more manipulable than another if and only if this agent prefers the latter to the...

Place Based Policies with Unemployment

By Patrick Kline and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2013

We develop a stylized model of frictional local labor markets with the goal of studying the efficiency of unemployment differences across areas. The model adapts the widely used Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides framework to a local labor market setting with a...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

Term Premia and Inflation Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from an International Panel Dataset

By Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Review, June 2011

This paper provides cross-country empirical evidence on term premia. I construct a panel of zero-coupon nominal government bond yields spanning ten industrialized countries and nearly two decades. I hence compute forward rates and use two different method...

The Ethics of Incentivizing the Uninformed: A Vignette Study

By Sandro Ambuehl and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, May 2017

Our recent working paper (Ambuehl, Ockenfels, and Stewart 2017) shows theoretically and experimentally that people with higher costs of information processing respond more to an increase in the incentive for a complex transaction, and decide to participat...

Using Internet Data for Economic Research

By Benjamin Edelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

The data used by economists can be broadly divided into two categories. First, structured datasets arise when a government agency, trade association, or company can justify the expense of assembling records. The Internet has transformed how economists int...

Mindless Eating and Healthy Heuristics for the Irrational

By Brian Wansink, David R. Just, and Collin R. Payne

American Economic Review, May 2009

Killing Me Softly: The Fetal Origins Hypothesis

By Douglas Almond and Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

In the epidemiological literature, the fetal origins hypothesis associated with David J. Barker posits that chronic, degenerative conditions of adult health, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes, may be triggered by circumstances decades earlier, p...

Optimal Sticky Prices under Rational Inattention

By Bartosz Mackowiak and Mirko Wiederholt

American Economic Review, June 2009

This paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to, subject to a constraint on information flow. When idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions, firms pay more attention...