The Early Development of Intellectual Property Institutions in the United States

By B. Zorina Khan and Kenneth L. Sokoloff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

The U.S. was a pioneer in establishing the world's first modern intellectual property system. That system was distinguished by the provision of broad access to, and strict enforcement of, property rights in new inventions, coupled with the requirement of ...

Capital Flow Management

By Olivier Jeanne

American Economic Review, May 2012

There is a wide variety in the capital account policies of emerging markets and developing economies. Some countries, such as Brazil, have recently experimented with prudential controls on capital inflows, whereas others, such as China, have continued to ...

Market Regulations, Prices, and Productivity

By Gilbert Cette, Jimmy Lopez, and Jacques Mairesse

American Economic Review, May 2016

This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to infer the consequences on productivity entailed by anticompetitive regulations in product and labor markets through their impacts on production prices and wages. Results show that changes in production...

Financiers versus Engineers: Should the Financial Sector Be Taxed or Subsidized?

By Thomas Philippon

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

I study the allocation of human capital in an economy with production externalities, financial constraints, and career choices. Agents choose to become entrepreneurs, workers, or financiers. Entrepreneurship has positive externalities but requires the ser...

Do Expectations Matter? The Great Moderation Revisited

By Fabio Canova and Luca Gambetti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

We examine the role of expectations in the Great Moderation episode. We derive theoretical restrictions in a New-Keynesian model and test them using measures of expectations obtained from survey data, the Greenbook and bond markets. Expectations explain t...

Do Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Child Health? Evidence from PROGRESA's Control Randomized Experiment

By Paul Gertler

American Economic Review, May 2004

Robustness to Parametric Assumptions in Missing Data Models

By Bryan S. Graham and Keisuke Hirano

American Economic Review, May 2011

We consider estimation of population averages when data are missing at random. If some cells contain few observations, there can be substantial gains from imposing parametric restrictions on the cell means, but there is also a danger of misspecification. ...

Bailouts and the Optimal Taxation of Bonus Pay

By Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper argues that the possibility of bailouts to financial intermediaries distorts the supply price of capital and creates an argument for taxing financial bonuses separately from other sources of income. We develop a model of financial contracting w...

Network Effects, Congestion Externalities, and Air Traffic Delays: Or Why Not All Delays Are Evil

By Christopher Mayer and Todd Sinai

American Economic Review, September 2003

We examine two factors that explain air traffic congestion: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. While both factors impact congestion, we find that the hubbing effect dominates empirically. Hub carriers incur most of the additiona...

Housing Assignment with Restrictions: Theory and Evidence from Stanford University's Campus

By Tim Landvoigt, Monika Piazzesi, and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper studies housing markets where a subset of houses in a restricted area is available exclusively to a subset of "eligible" buyers. An empirical part shows that houses on Stanford campus (available only to faculty) trade at substantial discounts t...

Report: Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession

By Marjorie B. McElroy

American Economic Review, May 2013

Optimal Policy Intervention and the Social Value of Public Information

By Jonathan G. James and Phillip Lawler

American Economic Review, June 2011

Svensson (2006) argues that Morris and Shin (2002) is, contrary to what is claimed, pro-transparency. This paper reexamines the issue but with an important modification to the original Morris and Shin framework. Recognizing that central banks impact the e...

Mobile Computing: The Next Platform Rivalry

By Timothy Bresnahan and Shane Greenstein

American Economic Review, May 2014

Competition to become one of several dominant mobile platforms is intense. Platforms compete for developers, who create applications which make the platform valuable for users. Why doesn't one form of platform governance emerge as superior? This essay wil...

Population Control Policies and Fertility Convergence

By Tiloka de Silva and Silvana Tenreyro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Rapid population growth in developing countries in the middle of the 20th century led to fears of a population explosion and motivated the inception of what effectively became a global population-control program. The initiative, propelled in its beginni...

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

By Jason Abaluck and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, December 2016

We explore the in- and out-of-sample robustness of tests for choice inconsistencies based on parameter restrictions in parametric models, focusing on tests proposed by Ketcham, Kuminoff, and Powers (2016). We argue that their nonparametric alternatives ar...

Flight Home, Flight Abroad, and International Credit Cycles

By Mariassunta Giannetti and Luc Laeven

American Economic Review, May 2012

This paper shows that banks exhibit a weaker (stronger) home bias in the extension of new loans when funding conditions in their home country improve (deteriorate). We refer to these changes in home bias as flight abroad and flight home effects, respectiv...

Ex Post (In) Efficient Negotiation and Breakdown of Trade

By Rajkamal Iyer and Antoinette Schoar

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper examines frictions in contract renegotiation and its implications for allocative efficiency of contracts. Using a novel audit study methodology, we find that contracting parties in general are reluctant to engage in hold up. However, many effic...

Demand Spillovers, Combative Advertising, and Celebrity Endorsements

By Craig L. Garthwaite

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

This paper studies the economic effects of endorsements. In the publishing sector, endorsements are found to be a business stealing form of advertising that raises title level sales without expanding the market size. If anything, the endorsements decre...

A Road Map for Efficiently Taxing Heterogeneous Agents

By Marios Karabarbounis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2016

This paper characterizes optimal labor income taxes that depend on age, household assets, and filing status (one or two earners) within a life-cycle model with heterogeneous, two-member households. The key innovation is a labor supply elasticity that vari...

Integration and Independent Innovation on a Network

By Joseph Farrell

American Economic Review, May 2003