Classroom Games: Speculation and Bubbles in an Asset Market

By Sheryl B. Ball and Charles A. Holt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

This paper describes a classroom exercise in which students trade assets of uncertain value in a sequence of market periods. Assets pay one-dollar dividends at the end of each period, but once the dividend is paid there is fixed probability that the asset...

The Long-Term Effects of the Printing Press in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Julia Cagé and Valeria Rueda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

This article investigates the long-term consequences of the printing press in the nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa on social capital nowadays. Protestant missionaries were the first to import the printing press and to allow the indigenous population ...

The Role of Government Reimbursement in Drug Shortages

By Ali Yurukoglu, Eli Liebman, and David B. Ridley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the incidence of drug shortages rose, especially for generic injectable drugs such as anesthetics and chemotherapy treatments. We examine whether reimbursement changes contributed to the shortages, focusing on a reduction in Me...

Pass-Through of Emissions Costs in Electricity Markets

By Natalia Fabra and Mar Reguant

American Economic Review, September 2014

We measure the pass-through of emissions costs to electricity prices. We perform both reduced-form and structural estimations based on optimal bidding in this market. Using rich micro-level data, we estimate the channels affecting pass-through in a flexib...

Serial Default and the "Paradox" of Rich-to-Poor Capital Flows

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, May 2004

Narrow Networks on the Health Insurance Exchanges: What Do They Look Like and How Do They Affect Pricing? A Case Study of Texas

By Leemore Dafny, Igal Hendel, and Nathan Wilson

American Economic Review, May 2015

The Affordable Care Act has engendered significant changes in the design of health insurance products. We examine the "narrowness" of hospital networks affiliated with plans offered in the first year of the marketplaces. Using data from Texas, we find lim...

Absolute Poverty: When Necessity Displaces Desire

By Robert C. Allen

American Economic Review, December 2017

A new basis for an international poverty measurement is proposed based on linear programming for specifying the least cost diet and explicit budgeting for nonfood spending. This approach is superior to the World Bank's $1-a-day line because it is (i) clea...

Copying and Copyright

[Symposium: Intellectual Property Rights]

By Hal R. Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Today most newly created textual, photographic, audio, and video content is available in digital form. Even older content that was not "born digital" can relatively easily converted to machine-readable formats. At same time, the world has become more netw...

Modeling the Revolving Revolution: The Debt Collection Channel

By Lukasz A. Drozd and Ricardo Serrano-Padial

American Economic Review, March 2017

We investigate the role of information technology (IT) in the collection of delinquent consumer debt. We argue that the widespread adoption of IT by the debt collection industry in the 1990s contributed to the observed expansion of unsecured risky lending...

Merit Aid, College Quality, and College Completion: Massachusetts' Adams Scholarship as an In-Kind Subsidy

By Sarah R. Cohodes and Joshua S. Goodman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

We analyze a Massachusetts merit aid program that gives highscoring students tuition waivers at in-state public colleges with lower graduation rates than available alternative colleges. A regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and...

Microeconomic Origins of Macroeconomic Tail Risks

By Daron Acemoglu, Asuman Ozdaglar, and Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi

American Economic Review, January 2017

Using a multisector general equilibrium model, we show that the interplay of idiosyncratic microeconomic shocks and sectoral heterogeneity results in systematic departures in the likelihood of large economic downturns relative to what is implied by the no...

Long-Term Contracting with Markovian Consumers

By Marco Battaglini

American Economic Review, June 2005

To study how a firm can capitalize on a long-term customer relationship, we characterize the optimal contract between a monopolist and a consumer whose preferences follow a Markov process. The optimal contract is nonstationary and has infinite memory, but...

Art and Money

By William N. Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog, and Christophe Spaenjers

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper investigates the impact of equity markets and top incomes on art prices. Using a newly constructed art market index, we demonstrate that equity market returns have had a significant impact on the price level in the art market over the last two ...

Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions, and Clubs

By Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov, and Konstantin Sonin

American Economic Review, June 2012

In dynamic collective decision making, current decisions determine the future distribution of political power and influence future decisions. We develop a general framework to study this class of problems. Under acyclicity, we characterize dynamically sta...

U.S. Industry Adjustment to Economic Deregulation

[Symposium: Legacy of Deregulation]

By Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

This paper develops a framework to analyze the long-run adjustment of U.S. industries to economic deregulation, highlighting the role of intensified competition, innovations in operations, marketing, and technology, and adjustments to external shocks. The...

The Effect of Product Demand on Inequality: Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom

By Marco Leonardi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data this paper shows that more educated workers demand more high-skill-intensive services and, to a lesser extent, more very low-skill-intensive services (such as personal services). Additional evidence at the Metropolit...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

Costly Information Acquisition: Experimental Analysis of a Boundedly Rational Model

By Xavier Gabaix, David Laibson, Guillermo Moloche, and Stephen Weinberg

American Economic Review, September 2006

The directed cognition model assumes that agents use partially myopic option-value calculations to select their next cognitive operation. The current paper tests this model by studying information acquisition in two experiments. In the first experiment,...

The Real Effects of European Monetary Union

[Symposium: The Euro]

By Philip R. Lane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

We explore the impact of European monetary union on the economies of the member countries. Inflation differentials across the euro area have been persistent, such that cumulative real exchange rate movements across the euro area have been quite substantia...

Choice Inconsistencies among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program: Comment

By Jonathan D. Ketcham, Nicolai V. Kuminoff, and Christopher A. Powers

American Economic Review, December 2016

Consumers' enrollment decisions in Medicare Part D can be explained by Abaluck and Gruber's (2011) model of utility maximization with psychological biases or by a neoclassical version of their model that precludes such biases. We evaluate these competing ...