Meiping Sun on how a $1 MTA farecard surcharge had a $200 million effect

[Page]

What happened when the NYC subway system tried to cut down on paper waste

Asymmetric Information, Adverse Selection and Online Disclosure: The Case of eBay Motors

By Gregory Lewis

American Economic Review, June 2011

Since Akerlof (1970), economists have understood the adverse selection problem that information asymmetries can create in used goods markets. The remarkable growth in online used goods auctions thus poses a puzzle. Part of the solution is that sellers vol...

Coercive Contract Enforcement: Law and the Labor Market in Nineteenth Century Industrial Britain

By Suresh Naidu and Noam Yuchtman

American Economic Review, February 2013

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of...

Policy Persistence

By Stephen Coate and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, December 1999

Roberto Chang on the impact of low interest rates on emerging markets

[Page]

What has happened with global interest rates since the Great Recession?

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

Shun Wang on whether a richer China is a happier China

[Page]

Economic growth and happiness don't necessarily go hand in hand

Yue Li on how people think about saving for retirement

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A lab experiment showed people don't always do the best job planning ahead

Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

By Michael Callen and James D. Long

American Economic Review, January 2015

We investigate the relationship between political networks, weak institutions, and election fraud during the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan combining: (i) data on political connections between candidates and election officials; (ii) a nationwi...

Zaiyan Wei on the economics of online reviews

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How does the size of a website's audience affect the tone of online reviews?

Leadership and Information

By Mana Komai, Mark Stegeman, and Benjamin E. Hermalin

American Economic Review, June 2007

An organization makes collective decisions through neither markets nor contracts. Instead, rational agents voluntarily choose to follow a leader. In many cases, incentive problems are solved: the unique nondegenerate equilibrium achieves the first best, e...

Do Police Reduce Crime? Estimates Using the Allocation of Police Forces After a Terrorist Attack

By Rafael Di Tella and Ernesto Schargrodsky

American Economic Review, March 2004

An important challenge in the crime literature is to isolate causal effects of police on crime. Following a terrorist attack on the main Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1994, all Jewish institutions received police protection. Thus, this...

On the Sources of the Great Moderation

By Jordi Galí and Luca Gambetti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

The Great Moderation in the US economy has been accompanied by large changes in the comovements among output, hours, and labor productivity. Those changes are reflected in both conditional and unconditional second moments as well as in the impulse resp...

Back to Fundamentals: Equilibrium in Abstract Economies

By Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein

American Economic Review, August 2015

We propose a new abstract definition of equilibrium in the spirit of competitive equilibrium: a profile of alternatives and a public ordering (expressing prestige, price, or a social norm) such that each agent prefers his assigned alternative to all lower...

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2016

Dynamic Delegation of Experimentation

By Yingni Guo

American Economic Review, August 2016

I study a dynamic relationship where a principal delegates experimentation to an agent. Experimentation is modeled as a one-armed bandit that yields successes following a Poisson process. Its unknown intensity is high or low. The agent has private informa...

An Interim Evaluation of Sulfur Dioxide Emissions Trading

[Symposium: SO2 Trading]

By Richard Schmalensee, Paul L. Joskow, A. Denny Ellerman, Juan Pablo Montero, and Elizabeth M. Bailey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

This paper summarizes recent empirical research on compliance costs and strategies and on permit market performance under the U.S. acid rain program, the first large-scale, long-term program to use tradeable emissions permits to control pollution. An effi...

On the Verges of Overconfidence

[Symposium: Overconfidence]

By Ulrike Malmendier and Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

This symposium provides several examples of overconfidence in certain economic contexts. Michael Grubb looks at "Overconfident Consumers in the Marketplace." Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate consider "Behavioral CEOs: The Role of Managerial Overc...

Are Restaurants Really Supersizing America?

By Michael L. Anderson and David A. Matsa

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

While many researchers and policymakers infer from correlations between eating out and body weight that restaurants are a leading cause of obesity, a basic identification problem challenges these conclusions. We exploit the placement of Interstate Highway...

Microeconomic Approaches to Development: Schooling, Learning, and Growth

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Mark R. Rosenzweig

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

Within the field of economic development over the past 15 years or so, particularly significant advances have been made in what can be loosely called micro-development, an area defined principally by the units that are examined, not by a particular method...