International Prices, Costs, and Markup Differences

By Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and Nicholas Li

American Economic Review, October 2011

Relative cross-border retail prices, in a common currency, comove closely with the nominal exchange rate. Using product-level prices and wholesale costs from a grocery chain operating in the United States and Canada, we decompose this variation into relat...

Tax Policy Issues in Designing a Carbon Tax

By Donald B. Marron and Eric J. Toder

American Economic Review, May 2014

A carbon tax is a promising tool for discouraging the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In principle, a well-designed tax could reduce the risk of climate change, minimize the cost of emissions reductions, encourage innovation in low-car...

The Principles of Macroeconomics at the Millennium

By Michael Parkin

American Economic Review, May 2000

Involving Undergraduates in Research To Encourage Them To Undertake Ph.D. Study in Economics

By Ronald G. Ehrenberg

American Economic Review, May 2005

Who Are China's Entrepreneurs?

By Simeon Djankov, Yingyi Qian, Gérard Roland, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Costs of Carbon Sequestration: A Revealed-Preference Approach

By Robert N. Stavins

American Economic Review, September 1999

Theory, General Equilibrium, and Political Economy in Development Economics

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Daron Acemoglu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

I discuss the role of economic theory in empirical work in development economics with special emphasis on general equilibrium and political economy considerations. I argue that economic theory plays (should play) a central role in formulating models, esti...

Evolution of Impatience: The Example of the Farmer-Sheriff Game

By David K. Levine, Salvatore Modica, Federico Weinschelbaum, and Felipe Zurita

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

The literature on the evolution of impatience, focusing on one-person decision problems, often finds that evolutionary forces favor the more patient individuals. This paper shows that in games where equilibrium involves threat of punishment there are forc...

Pricing, Profits, and Technological Progress in the Pharmaceutical Industry

By F. M. Scherer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

The decades-old debate over pharmaceutical industry prices, profits, and innovation has again intensified. A number of events coalesced to refocus public interest on pharmaceuticals. Contributing to public concern were Bureau of Labor Statistics price ind...

Time Use during the Great Recession

By Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst, and Loukas Karabarbounis

American Economic Review, August 2013

Using data from the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2010, we document that home production absorbs roughly 30 percent of foregone market work hours at business cycle frequencies. Leisure absorbs roughly 50 percent of foregone market work ho...

Intermediation and Economic Integration

By Pol Antrás and Arnaud Costinot

American Economic Review, May 2010

Dynamic Revenue Maximization with Heterogeneous Objects: A Mechanism Design Approach

By Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

We study the revenue-maximizing allocation of several heterogeneous, commonly ranked objects to impatient agents with privately known characteristics who arrive sequentially. There is a deadline after which no more objects can be allocated. We first ch...

The Liability Insurance Market

[Symposium: The Economics of Liability]

By Ralph A. Winter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

This paper offers an overview of the U.S. liability insurance market and the link between its performance and developments in tort law. Over the last few decades, the dominant feature of the insurance market has been the insurance cycle: intermittent peri...

What We Know and Do Not Know about the Natural Rate of Unemployment

[Symposium: The Natural Rate of Unemployment]

By Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Over the past three decades, much research has attempted to identify the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment. The authors reach two main conclusions about this body of work. First, there has been considerable theoretical progress over the pas...

Estimating Time Preferences from Convex Budgets

By James Andreoni and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Review, December 2012

Experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what seems reasonable for economic decision-making. Such high rates are often attributed to present-biased discounting. A well-known bias of standard measurements is the assumption of li...

The Impact of State Licensing Regulations on Low-Skilled Immigrants: The Case of Vietnamese Manicurists

By Maya N. Federman, David E. Harrington, and Kathy J. Krynski

American Economic Review, May 2006

Information Acquisition in Competitive Markets: An Application to the US Mortgage Market

By Jeremy M. Burke, Curtis R. Taylor, and Liad Wagman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2012

How do price commitments impact the amount of information firms acquire about potential customers? We examine this question in the context of a competitive market where firms search for information that may disqualify applicants. Contracts are incomplete ...

The Differential Effects of Bilateral Tax Treaties

By Bruce A. Blonigen, Lindsay Oldenski, and Nicholas Sly

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

Bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) are intended to promote foreign direct investment through double-taxation relief. Using BEA firm-level data, we find a positive effect of BTTs on FDI, which is larger for firms that use differentiated inputs. BTTs allow mu...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

By Andrew Postlewaite

American Economic Review, May 2010

Cable Modems and DSL: Broadband Internet Access for Residential Customers

By Jerry A. Hausman, J. Gregory Sidak, and HalJ. Singer

American Economic Review, May 2001