Stock Market Wealth and Consumption

By James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

This paper explores the link between changes in the aggregate value of corporate stock and changes in consumer spending. It presents data on the distribution of corporate stock ownership based on the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances. It also uses time-ser...

Conflicts and Common Interests in Committees

By Hao Li, Sherwin Rosen, and Wing Suen

American Economic Review, December 2001

Committees improve decisions by pooling members' independent information, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences. Committee decision procedures transform continuous data int...

Character Endorsements and Electoral Competition

By Archishman Chakraborty and Parikshit Ghosh

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

When an elite-controlled media strategically endorses candidates in order to promote its own ideological agenda, office-seeking parties may completely pander to the media, under moderate ideological conflict between voters and the elite. Larger ideolog...

Consumer Confidence and Consumer Spending

[Symposium: Consumer Confidence]

By Sydney C. Ludvigson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Despite the widespread attention given to surveys of consumer confidence, the mechanisms by which household attitudes influence the real economy are less well understood. This paper begins with an overview of how consumer confidence is measured and report...

Assessing Sale Strategies in Online Markets Using Matched Listings

By Liran Einav, Theresa Kuchler, Jonathan Levin, and Neel Sundaresan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We use data from eBay to identify hundreds of thousands of instances in which retailers posted otherwise identical product listings with targeted variation in pricing and auction design. We use these matched listings to measure the dispersion in auction p...

Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank's Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2006

Proponents and critics alike agree that the policies spawned by the Washington Consensus have not produced the desired results. The debate now is not over whether the Washington Consensus is dead or alive, but over what will replace it. An important ma...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2016

Inferring Carbon Abatement Costs in Electricity Markets: A Revealed Preference Approach Using the Shale Revolution

By Joseph A. Cullen and Erin T. Mansur

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

This paper examines how carbon pricing would reduce emissions in the electricity sector. Both carbon prices and cheap natural gas reduce the historic cost advantage of coal plants. The shale revolution resulted in unprecedented variation in natural gas pr...

Restoring Banking Stability: Beyond Supervised Capital Requirements

[Symposium: Global Financial Instability]

By Gerard Caprio and Patrick Honohan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

Emerging economies have been particularly prone to financial sector crises, reflecting marked information asymmetries and political interference, as well as the substantial volatility in underlying economic conditions, and the vulnerability of banking and...

A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change

By William D. Nordhaus

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. An exami...

Collective Memory, Cultural Transmission, and Investments

By Roberta Dessí

American Economic Review, March 2008

I study the transmission of collective memory as a mechanism for cultural transmission, in the presence of social externalities associated with individual cultural investment decisions. The younger generation's decisions depend on beliefs about the qualit...

Debt Financing in Asset Markets

By Zhiguo He and Wei Xiong

American Economic Review, May 2012

We study rollover risk and collateral value in a dynamic asset pricing model with endogenous debt financing by extending the framework of Geanakoplos (2009) with a generic binomial tree and time-varying heterogeneous beliefs. Optimistic borrowers face rol...

A Behavioral Analysis of Stochastic Reference Dependence

By Yusufcan Masatlioglu and Collin Raymond

American Economic Review, September 2016

We examine the reference-dependent risk preferences of Koszegi and Rabin (2007), focusing on their choice-acclimating personal equilibria. Although their model has only a trivial intersection (expected utility) with other reference-dependent models, it ha...

Imported Inputs and Productivity

By László Halpern, Miklós Koren, and Adam Szeidl

American Economic Review, December 2015

We estimate a model of importers in Hungarian microdata and conduct counterfactual analysis to investigate the effect of imported inputs on productivity. We find that importing all input varieties would increase a firm's revenue productivity by 22 percent...

Redistribution and Social Insurance

By Mikhail Golosov, Maxim Troshkin, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, February 2016

We study optimal redistribution and insurance in a life-cycle economy with private idiosyncratic shocks. We characterize Pareto optima, show the forces determining optimal labor distortions, and derive closed form expressions for their limiting behavior. ...

A Representative Consumer Theory of Distribution

By Francesco Caselli and Jaume Ventura

American Economic Review, September 2000

This paper introduces various sources of consumer heterogeneity in one-sector representative consumer (RC) growth models and develops tools to study the evolution of the distribution of consumptions, assets, and incomes. These tools are applied to the Ram...

The Effects of State Medicaid Expansions for Working-Age Adults on Senior Medicare Beneficiaries

By Melissa McInerney, Jennifer M. Mellor, and Lindsay M. Sabik

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Do Medicaid expansions to working-age adults affect healthcare spending and utilization among older Medicare beneficiaries? Although economic theory provides conflicting predictions about the presence and direction of such spillover effects, it does ident...

The Phillips Curve, the Persistence of Inflation, and the Lucas Critique: Evidence from Exchange-Rate Regimes: Comment

By Clemens J. M. Kool and Alex Lammertsma

American Economic Review, March 2000

Why Organizations Fail: Models and Cases

By Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Organizations fail due to incentive problems (agents do not want to act in the organization's interests) and bounded rationality problems (agents do not have the necessary information to do so). This survey uses recent advances in organizational economics...

Long-Run Risk Is the Worst-Case Scenario

By Rhys Bidder and Ian Dew-Becker

American Economic Review, September 2016

We study an investor who is unsure of the dynamics of the economy. Not only are parameters unknown, but the investor does not even know what order model to estimate. She estimates her consumption process nonparametrically--allowing potentially infinite-or...