The Roma/Non-Roma Test Score Gap in Hungary

By Gábor Kertesi and Gábor Kézdi

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper documents and decomposes the test score gap between Roma and non-Roma 8th graders in Hungary in 2006. Our data connect national standardized test scores to an individual panel survey with detailed data on ethnicity and family background. The te...

Fidelity Networks and Long-Run Trends in HIV/AIDS Gender Gaps

By Roland Pongou and Roberto Serrano

American Economic Review, May 2013

More than half of the HIV/AIDS-infected population today are women. We study a dynamic model of (in)fidelity, which explains the HIV/AIDS gender gap by the configuration of sexual networks. Each individual desires sexual relationships with opposite sex in...

Local Discouragement and Global Collapse: A Theory of Coordination Avalanches

By Thomas D. Jeitschko and Curtis R. Taylor

American Economic Review, March 2001

We study a dynamic game in which all players initially possess the same information and coordinate on a high level of activity. Eventually, players with a long string of bad experiences become inactive. This prospect can cause a coordination avalanche in ...

The Agency Problems of Institutional Investors

[Symposium: The Modern Corporation]

By Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alma Cohen, and Scott Hirst

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

Financial economics and corporate governance have long focused on the agency problems between corporate managers and shareholders that result from the dispersion of ownership in large publicly traded corporations. In this paper, we focus on how the rise o...

Random Walk Expectations and the Forward Discount Puzzle

By Philippe Bacchetta and Eric van Wincoop

American Economic Review, May 2007

Disentangling Insurance and Information in Intertemporal Consumption Choices

By Katja Kaufmann and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, May 2009

Persuasion by Cheap Talk

By Archishman Chakraborty and Rick Harbaugh

American Economic Review, December 2010

We consider the credibility, persuasiveness, and informativeness of multidimensional cheap talk by an expert to a decision maker. We find that an expert with state-independent preferences can always make credible comparative statements that trade off the ...

Designing Institutions to Deal with Terrorism in the United States

By Martin Feldstein

American Economic Review, May 2008

Can Contract Theory Explain Social Preferences?

By W. Bentley MacLeod

American Economic Review, May 2007

Corrigendum: Measuring the Output Responses to Fiscal Policy

By Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

The published version of our paper had an accounting mistake in the construction of one time series. This note describes the mistake and presents results based on corrected data. The revised results are very similar to those originally reported.

The Effects of Population Aging on the Relationship among Aggregate Consumption, Saving, and Income

By Karen E. Dynan, Wendy Edelberg, and Michael G. Palumbo

American Economic Review, May 2009

Incomplete Contracts and Ownership: Some New thoughts

By Oliver Hart and John Moore

American Economic Review, May 2007

Heuristics and Biases in Retirement Savings Behavior

[Symposium: The Adequacy of Retirement Saving]

By Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Standard economic theories of saving implicitly assume that households have the cognitive ability to solve the relevant optimization problem and the willpower to execute the optimal plan. Both of the implicit assumptions are suspect. Even among economists...

Optimal Monetary Policy Rules in an Estimated Sticky-Information Model

By Ricardo Reis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

This paper uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky information as a laboratory to study monetary policy. It characterizes the model's predictions for macro dynamics and optimal policy at prior parameters, and then uses da...

Immigration and Poverty in the United States

By Steven Raphael and Eugene Smolensky

American Economic Review, May 2009

Seniority, Wages and Productivity: A Turbulent Decade

[Symposium: Seniority and Wages]

By Robert M. Hutchens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

Why does a worker's wage tend to grow with seniority in the firm, and what does this have to do with productivity? Two decades ago, neoclassical labor economists thought that the theory of human capital provided a good answer to this question. The last de...

Treatment Effects and Informative Missingness with an Application to Bank Recapitalization Programs

By Angela Vossmeyer

American Economic Review, May 2014

This article develops a Bayesian framework for estimating multivariate treatment effect models in the presence of sample selection. The methodology is applied to a banking study that evaluates the effectiveness of lender of last resort (LOLR) policies and...

Antitrust and Merger Policy: A Review and Critique

[Symposium: Horizontal Mergers and Antitrust]

By Lawrence J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

This review will consider the Department of Justice Merger Guidelines of the 1980s, discussing market definition, market share concentration and entry conditions, consideration of other market characteristics, and cost efficiencies. It will also assess th...

Optimal Learning Patterns for Creativity Generation in a Field

By Jonathan S. Feinstein

American Economic Review, May 2011

I present a model of optimal learning for creativity generation in a field. The field is defined as a knowledge structure. A creative contribution is based on combining two previously unconnected elements, generating a new element. Individuals may possess...

Some Evolutionary Economics of Family Partnerships

By Theodore C. Bergstrom

American Economic Review, May 2007