Does Less Income Mean Less Representation?

By Eric Brunner, Stephen L. Ross, and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

We assemble a novel dataset of matched legislative and constituent votes and demonstrate that less income does not mean less representation. We show: (i) The opinions of high- and low-income voters are highly correlated; the legislator's vote often refle...

Flexible Estimation of Treatment Effect Parameters

By Thomas MaCurdy, Xiaohong Chen, and Han Hong

American Economic Review, May 2011

A variety of identification strategies have a common cell structure, in which the observed heterogeneity of the regression defines a partition of the sample into cells. Typically in the presence of exogenous covariates that define the cell structure, iden...

Technology Adoption with Exit in Imperfectly Informed Equity Markets

By Katrin Tinn

American Economic Review, June 2010

This paper focuses on the importance of equity markets in facilitating the exit of entrepreneurs investing in technology. Entrepreneurs' willingness to invest and aggregate output is affected in two opposite ways. First, uncertainty about equity price or...

Intrafirm Trade and Product Contractibility

By Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, May 2010

How Retirement Saving Programs Increase Saving

[Symposium: Government Incentives for Saving]

By James M. Poterba, Steven F. Venti, and David A. Wise

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

This paper summarizes the authors work on the effect of IRA and 401(k) contributions on net personal saving. They consider many different nonparametric approaches to controlling for heterogeneity in individual saving behavior and conclude that the weight ...

Optimal Pension Systems with Simple Instruments

By Mikhail Golosov, Ali Shourideh, Maxim Troshkin, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, May 2013

We analyze optimal pension systems relying on simple policy instruments in a lifecycle environment which admits endogenous decisions of how much to work as well as when to retire. The optimality in this context means the highest welfare that can be achie...

Credit Rationing?

By Dan Bernhardt

American Economic Review, March 2000

Generational Accounting in Europe

By Bernd Raffelhuschen

American Economic Review, May 1999

Sharing Ambiguity

By Larry G. Epstein

American Economic Review, May 2001

Surplus Maximization and Optimality

By Edward E. Schlee

American Economic Review, October 2013

Expected consumer's surplus rarely represents preferences over price lotteries. Still, I give sufficient conditions for policies which maximize aggregate expected surplus to be interim Pareto Optimal. Besides two standard partial equilibrium conditions, I...

Bargaining in Stationary Networks

By Mihai Manea

American Economic Review, August 2011

We study an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players connected in a network are randomly matched to bargain. Players who reach agreement are replaced by new players at the same positions in the network. We show that all equilibria are payoff equiva...

Vertical Control of Price and Inventory

By Harish Krishnan and Ralph A. Winter

American Economic Review, December 2007

This paper offers a simple approach to the theory of decentralizing inventory and pricing decisions along a supply chain. We consider an upstream manufacturer selling to two outlets, which compete as differentiated duopolists and face uncertain demand....

What Do College Seniors Know about Economics?

By William B. Walstad and Sam Allgood

American Economic Review, May 1999

An Interpretation of Recent Research on Exchange Rate Target Zones

By Lars E. O. Svensson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1992

How do exchange rate bands work compared to completely fixed rates (between realignments); or, more precisely, what are the dynamics of exchange rates, interest rates, and central bank interventions within exchange rate bands? Does the difference between ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

Corrigendum: Emerging Market Currency Excess Returns

By Stephen Gilmore and Fumio Hayashi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

Puzzles: Blockades, Carrier Missions, Secret Intelligence, and More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

As usual, this feature begins with several speed puzzles; answers can be found at the end of the problems. Following is one longer puzzle for which readers are challenged to submit their own answer. The puzzles in this issue focus on everything from diver...

Global Financial Crisis and Africa: Is the Impact Permanent or Transitory? Time Series Evidence from North Africa

By Hassan Y. Aly and Mark C. Strazicich

American Economic Review, May 2011

We utilize time series tests with structural breaks to test for an adverse impact on economic growth rates in North Africa associated with the recent US financial crisis and global recession. One or two breaks are identified for each country, except for M...

The Structure of Tariffs and Long-Term Growth

By Nathan Nunn and Daniel Trefler

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

We show that the "skill bias" of a country's tariff structure is positively correlated with long-term per capita GDP growth. Testing for causal mechanisms, we find evidence consistent with the existence of real benefits from tariffs focused in skill-inte...

The Role of Intergenerational Transfers and Life Cycle Saving in the Accumulation of Wealth

[Symposium: Explaining Savings]

By Franco Modigliani

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

The purpose of this paper is to review what economists know at present about the following question: How large a portion of the existing wealth is the result of a bequest motive, that is, of accumulation for the specific purpose of leaving bequests? But ...