Diagnosing Consumer Confusion and Sub-optimal Shopping Effort: Theory and Mortgage-Market Evidence

By Susan E. Woodward and Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, December 2012

Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to...

Networks, Markets, and Inequality

By Julien Gagnon and Sanjeev Goyal

American Economic Review, January 2017

The interaction between community and markets remains a central theme in the social sciences. The empirical evidence is rich: in some instances, markets strengthen social ties, while in others they undermine them. The impact of markets on inequality and w...

The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography

By Paul Krugman

American Economic Review, June 2009

Thirty years have passed since a small group of theorists began applying concepts and tools from industrial organization to the analysis of international trade. The new models of trade that emerged from that work didn't supplant traditional trade theory...

The Road to Price Stability

By Athanasios Orphanides

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Case for Randomized Field Trials in Economic and Policy Research

[Symposium: Social Experiments]

By Gary Burtless

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

Social experiments have been used in research since the 1960s, yet the technique of controlled experimentation still arouses controversy among social scientists. The crucial element that distinguishes a controlled experiment from other forms of research i...

Frontiers of Real-Time Data Analysis

By Dean Croushore

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

In the past ten years, researchers have explored the impact of data revisions in many different contexts. Researchers have examined the properties of data revisions, how structural modeling is affected by data revisions, how data revisions affect forecas...

Human Resources from an Organizational Behavior Perspective: Some Paradoxes Explained

[Symposium: Human Resource Management]

By Jeffrey Pfeffer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

Workplaces in America and elsewhere show pervasive job dissatisfaction, distrust, and disengagement, with the evidence suggesting that these problems are getting worse and have a number of negative consequences for employers as well as employees. What fol...

Betting on Secession: Quantifying Political Events Surrounding Slavery and the Civil War

By Charles W. Calomiris and Jonathan Pritchett

American Economic Review, January 2016

Lincoln's election produced Southern secession, war, and abolition. Using a new dataset on slave sales, we examine connections between news and slave prices for the period 1856-1861. By August 1861, slave prices had declined by roughly one-third from thei...

Elephants

By Michael Kremer and Charles Morcom

American Economic Review, March 2000

Many open-access resources, such as elephants, are used to produce storable goods. Anticipated future scarcity of these resources will increase current prices and poaching. This implies that, for given initial conditions, there may be rational expectation...

A Structural Approach to Explaining Incomplete Exchange-Rate Pass-Through and Pricing-to-Market

By Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg and Rebecca Hellerstein

American Economic Review, May 2008

Bargaining and Distribution in Marriage

By Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

The standard economic model of the family is a 'common preference' model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources. In recent yea...

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivations for Tax Compliance: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Germany

By Nadja Dwenger, Henrik Kleven, Imran Rasul, and Johannes Rincke

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

We study extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for tax compliance in the context of a local church tax in Germany. This tax system has historically relied on zero deterrence so that any compliance at baseline is intrinsically motivated. Starting from this z...

In Honor of Kevin M. Murphy: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Finis Welch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

Kevin M. Murphy is the winner of the 1998 John Bates Clark Medal, presented by the American Economic Association every second year to an outstanding economist under the age of forty who is selected for special recognition. He is the George Pratt Schultz P...

A Strategy for Efficient Debt Reduction

[Symposium: New Institutions for Developing Country Debt]

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

Debt reduction, like bankruptcy, needs an institutional setting to bring it about, to overcome an inherent free-rider problem. Even when it is in the collective interests of the banks to reduce the debt, each individual bank is still tempted to insist on ...

The Elasticity of Corporate Taxable Income: New Evidence from UK Tax Records

By Michael P. Devereux, Li Liu, and Simon Loretz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

We estimate the elasticity of corporate taxable income with respect to the statutory corporation tax rate using the population of UK corporation tax returns. We analyze bunching in the distribution of taxable income at kinks in the marginal rate schedu...

Mergers When Prices Are Negotiated: Evidence from the Hospital Industry

By Gautam Gowrisankaran, Aviv Nevo, and Robert Town

American Economic Review, January 2015

We estimate a bargaining model of competition between hospitals and managed care organizations (MCOs) and use the estimates to evaluate the effects of hospital mergers. We find that MCO bargaining restrains hospital prices significantly. The model demonst...

Domestic Effects of the Foreign Activities of US Multinationals

By Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, and James R. Hines

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2009

Do firms investing abroad simultaneously reduce their domestic activity? This paper analyzes the relationship between the domestic and foreign operations of US manufacturing firms between 1982 and 2004 by instrumenting for changes in foreign operations...

Nonlinear Models of Measurement Errors

By Xiaohong Chen, Han Hong, and Denis Nekipelov

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2011

Measurement errors in economic data are pervasive and nontrivial in size. The presence of measurement errors causes biased and inconsistent parameter estimates and leads to erroneous conclusions to various degrees in economic analysis. While linear errors...

Puzzles: Choose a Curtain, Duel-ity, Two Point Conversions, and More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

In presenting economic puzzles, I have three goals in mind: some puzzles are chosen to stimulate research; others offer examples that will help undergraduate and graduate teaching; all should provide quality distractions during seminars. As usual, this fe...

The Evolution of Cooperation in Infinitely Repeated Games: Experimental Evidence

By Pedro Dal Bó and Guillaume R. Fréchette

American Economic Review, February 2011

A usual criticism of the theory of infinitely repeated games is that it does not provide sharp predictions since there may be a multiplicity of equilibria. To address this issue, we present experimental evidence on the evolution of cooperation in infinite...