Exchange Efficiency with Weak Ownership Rights

By Oren Bar-Gill and Nicola Persico

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

We show that efficient exchange obtains independently of the degree to which a legal system protects the rights of owners. We study a number of different legal rules, including property rules (strong protection), liability rules (any party can take the ow...

Interest Rate Risk in Credit Markets

By Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review, May 2010

Contracting with Repeated Moral Hazard and Private Evaluations

By William Fuchs

American Economic Review, September 2007

A repeated moral hazard setting in which the Principal privately observes the Agent's output is studied. The optimal contract for a finite horizon is characterized, and shown to require burning of resources. These are only burnt after the worst possible r...

Israel's Stabilization Program of 1985, or Some Simple Truths of Monetary Theory

By Don Patinkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Within a period of two months, and with minimal adverse effects on employment and the real functioning of the economy, Israel's 1985 stabilization program reduced the annual rate of inflation from close to 500 percent to less than 20 percent (correspondin...

Prior User Rights

By Carl Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2006

Optimal Proof Burdens, Deterrence, and the Chilling of Desirable Behavior

By Louis Kaplow

American Economic Review, May 2011

The optimal stringency of the burden of proof is characterized in a model in which relaxing the proof burden enhances deterrence but also chills desirable behavior. The result are strikingly different from those in prior work that uses a simpler model in ...

The Rise of Fringe Competitors in the Wake of an Emerging Middle Class: An Empirical Analysis

By Alon Eizenberg and Alberto Salvo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

The "emerging middle class" is a force of economic importance in many consumer markets around the globe. A striking phenomenon in some of these markets is the growth of "generic," low-price brands. This paper examines these phenomena in Brazil's large sof...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2010

Front Matter includes photograph of Angus S. Deaton as part of a series of photographs of past presidents of the Association.

Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: Chicago, IL, April 27, 2012

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2013

The Political Economy of the Budget Surplus in the United States

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Alberto Alesina

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

Current surpluses in the U.S. have been achieved by a combination of a strong economy, low interest rates, and sharp cuts in defense spending. These surpluses follow a period (the 1980s) of rather exceptional budget deficit. This paper investigates the or...

The Effects of Peer Group Heterogeneity on the Production of Human Capital at West Point

By David S. Lyle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2009

Understanding how heterogeneity in peer group composition affects academic attainment has important implications for how schools organize students in group settings. The random assignment of cadets to companies at West Point affords an opportunity to i...

Comparing Apples to Oranges: Productivity Convergence and Measurement across Industries and Countries: Reply

By Andrew B. Bernard and Charles I. Jones

American Economic Review, September 2001

Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: The Economist vs. Madmen in Authority

By Isabel V. Sawhill

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

This lecture, given to the Society of Government Economists in January 1995, examines the influence of research on policy and vice versa using three widely believed propositions. The first is that government spending is wasteful or ineffective and can rea...

Rent Preservation and the Persistence of Underdevelopment

By Raghuram G. Rajan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

When citizens in a poor constrained society are unequally endowed, they are likely to find it hard to agree on reforms, even though the status quo hurts them collectively. Each citizen group or constituency prefers reforms that expand its opportunities...

Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: Chicago, IL, April 23, 2010

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2011

Uncertainty and Economic Activity: Evidence from Business Survey Data

By Rüdiger Bachmann, Steffen Elstner, and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2013

This paper uses survey expectations data to construct empirical proxies for time-varying business-level uncertainty. Access to the micro data from the German IFO Business Climate Survey permits construction of uncertainty measures based on both ex ante di...

The Role of Firms in Gender Earnings Inequality: Evidence from the United States

By Isaac Sorkin

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper documents that in the US, men are more likely than women to work in both high-wage firms and high-wage industries. I then ask why this sorting occurs. I consider two main explanations: men and women have different preferences, and men and women...

Reputations, Relationships, and Contract Enforcement

By W. Bentley MacLeod

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

When the quality of a good is at the discretion of the seller, how can buyers assure that the seller provides the mutually efficient level of quality? Contracts that provide a bonus to the seller if the quality is acceptable or impose a penalty on the s...

The Core Matchings of Markets with Transfers

By Christopher P. Chambers and Federico Echenique

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We characterize the structure of the set of core matchings of an assignment game (a two-sided market with transfers). Such a set satisfies a property we call consistency. Consistency of a set of matchings states that, for any matching v, if, for each agen...

The Economics Major as Part of a Liberal Education: The Teagle Report: Comment

By Catharine Hill

American Economic Review, May 2009