The Geography of Conflicts and Regional Trade Agreements

By Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

In addition to standard trade gains, regional trade agreements (RTAs) can promote peaceful relations by increasing the opportunity cost of conflicts. Country pairs with large trade gains from RTAs and a high probability of conflict should be more likely t...

Symposium on Health Care Reform

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Joseph P. Newhouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

The papers in this symposium focus on two major issues of health economics in the context of President Clinton's Health Security Act: cost containment and labor market effects of financing insurance. The act proposes to limit public and private spending; ...

Matching and Price Competition: Comment

By Fuhito Kojima

American Economic Review, June 2007

A Guide to Health Care Reform

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

There are four rationales for health care reform: increasing the efficiency of health delivery; reforming the market for health insurance; providing universal coverage; and reducing the federal deficit. These goals are reflected in most reform proposals. ...

Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Classical Creed

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

Strotz Meets Allais: Diminishing Impatience and the Certainty Effect: Comment

By Kota Saito

American Economic Review, August 2011

Halevy (2008) states the equivalence between diminishing impatience (i.e., quasi-hyperbolic discounting) and the common ratio effect. The present paper shows that one way of the equivalence is false and shows the correct and general relationships: diminis...

Demand and Defective Growth Patterns: The Role of the Tradable and Non-tradable Sectors in an Open Economy

By Sandile Hlatshwayo and Michael Spence

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper examines the underlying structural elements of US growth patterns, pre- and post-crisis. Prior to the recession, the US economy exhibited a defective growth pattern driven by outsized domestic demand. As domestic aggregate demand retreats to mo...

Growth: With or Without Scale Effects?

By Charles I. Jones

American Economic Review, May 1999

Toward a Macroeconomics of the Medium Run

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of Economics]

By Robert M. Solow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

My main goal in this essay is to say something about leftover open questions in macroeconomics, as well as new phenomena that need to be accommodated in early 21st century macroeconomics, and the sorts of ideas that might make progress possible. The essay...

Risk Sharing Across Communities

By Yann Bramoullé and Rachel Kranton

American Economic Review, May 2007

Reallocation Costs and Efficiency

By Yuval Salant and Ron Siegel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

We study the efficient allocation of a divisible asset when reallocation is costly. Two players initially divide an asset between them. At the time of this initial division the players' valuations for the asset are uncertain. After the uncertainty resolve...

Consumer Search and Double Marginalization

By Maarten Janssen and Sandro Shelegia

American Economic Review, June 2015

The well-known double marginalization problem understates the inefficiencies arising from vertical relations in consumer search markets where consumers are uninformed about the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers to retailers. Consumer search provid...

Living Arrangements, Doubling Up, and the Great Recession: Was This Time Different?

By Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes

American Economic Review, May 2015

The Great Recession marks the worst downturn since those of the early 1980s. A large literature considers how the public safety net responded to this shock. We instead consider the responsiveness of one dimension of the private safety net. Families can re...

Nonprofit Organizations in the Health Sector

By Richard G. Frank and David S. Salkever

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Government appears to both promote and mistrust nonprofit organizations in the health sector. Tax exemptions, subsidies, and preferential treatment in contracts support these organizations. Legislation that links the supply of charity care to tax exemptio...

Whither Russia? A Review of Andrei Shleifer's A Normal Country

By Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2007

In this review, the author reflects on the heated debates around views about Russia's postcommunist transition expressed in essays collected in new Andrei Shleifer's book, A Normal Country: Russia after Communism (Harvard University Press, 2005), ...

The Role of Proximity in Foreclosure Externalities: Evidence from Condominiums

By Lynn M. Fisher, Lauren Lambie-Hanson, and Paul Willen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We measure the effect of foreclosures on the sale prices of nearby properties using a dataset of condominiums in Boston. A foreclosure in the same association and at the same address depresses the sale price by 2.5 percent, but properties in the same asso...

The Economic Transition of Czechoslovakia from Plan to Market

By Josef C. Brada

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

The Communist government of Czechoslovakia was ousted in the so-called Velvet Revolution of November 1989, and the new regime adopted as its goal the transformation of the economy to one based on markets and private property, and also one more dynamic and...

Trading Favors within Chinese Business Groups

By Raymond Fisman and Yongxiang Wang

American Economic Review, May 2010

A Theory of Optimal Random Crackdowns

By Jan Eeckhout, Nicola Persico, and Petra E. Todd

American Economic Review, June 2010

An incentives based theory of policing is developed which can explain the phenomenon of random "crackdowns," i.e., intermittent periods of high interdiction/ surveillance. For a variety of police objective functions, random crackdowns can be part of the...

Neuroeconomic Foundations of Trust and Social Preferences: Initial Evidence

By Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, and Michael Kosfeld

American Economic Review, May 2005