Direct Democracy and Public Employees

By John G. Matsusaka

American Economic Review, December 2009

In the public sector, employment may be inefficiently high because of patronage, and wages may be inefficiently high because of public employee interest groups. This paper explores whether the initiative process, a direct democracy institution of growing ...

Specific Capital and Vintage Effects on the Dynamics of Unemployment and Vacancies

By Burcu Eyigungor

American Economic Review, June 2010

In a reasonably calibrated Mortensen and Pissarides matching model, shocks to average labor productivity can account for a small portion of the fluctuations in unemployment and vacancies (Shimer (2005)). I add heterogeneity in jobs (matches) with respect ...

Capital Market Integration and Wages

By Anusha Chari, Peter Blair Henry, and Diego Sasson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

For three years after the typical emerging economy opens its stock market to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of three. No such increase occurs in a control group...

Skin-Tone Effects among African Americans: Perceptions and Reality

By Joni Hersch

American Economic Review, May 2006

Corrigendum: Quantitative Effects of Fiscal Foresight

By Eric M. Leeper, Alexander W. Richter, and Todd B. Walker

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

Diffusion of Information in Medical Care

[Symposium: Health Economics]

By Charles E. Phelps

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

This paper presents evidence that doctors behave very differently in making treatment recommendations depending on the region where they work, creating large variations in the quantities of care delivered to seemingly standardized populations. This eviden...

Immigration and Employer Transitions for STEM Workers

By Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

American Economic Review, May 2013

The firm is almost entirely absent from models of immigration, and yet firms play a central role for high-skilled immigration. The H-1B visa program, for example, is a firm-sponsored entry where firms are responsible for every stage: from identifying the ...

Boys' Cognitive Skill Formation and Physical Growth: Long-Term Experimental Evidence on Critical Ages for Early Childhood Interventions

By Tania Barham, Karen Macours, and John A. Maluccio

American Economic Review, May 2013

It is often assumed that early life circumstances, in particular before age two, are important for later human capital development. Using experimental variation in the timing of benefits from a conditional cash transfer program, we test the hypothesis tha...

Correspondence

By Rendigs Fels

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

Correspondence and response regarding: An Update on Leontief's Complaint [Academic Economics] [Theory versus Empiricism in Academic Economics: Update and Comparison]. What We Do with Our Heroes [Is Probability Theory Relevant for Uncertainty? A Post...

Channeling Remittances to Education: A Field Experiment among Migrants from El Salvador

By Kate Ambler, Diego Aycinena, and Dean Yang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

We implement a randomized experiment offering Salvadoran migrants matching funds for educational remittances, which are channeled directly to a beneficiary student in El Salvador chosen by the migrant. The matches lead to increased educational expenditure...

Do Monetary Policy Committees Need Leaders? A Report on an Experiment

By Alan S. Blinder and John Morgan

American Economic Review, May 2008

Selling to Overconfident Consumers

By Michael D. Grubb

American Economic Review, December 2009

Consumers may overestimate the precision of their demand forecasts. This overconfidence creates an incentive for both monopolists and competitive firms to offer tariffs with included quantities at zero marginal cost, followed by steep marginal charges....

Discounting and Growth

By Christian Gollier

American Economic Review, May 2014

In a growing economy, the discount rate to evaluate a long-term investment is the minimum rate of expected return that compensates for the increased intergenerational inequalities. Because the growth rate is uncertain, there is a precautionary argument in...

Credit Market Speculation and the Cost of Capital

By Yeon-Koo Che and Rajiv Sethi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

We examine the effect of speculation using credit derivatives on the cost of debt and the likelihood of default. The availability of credit default swaps induces investors who are optimistic about borrower revenues to sell protection instead of buying b...

Introduction to the Symposium on Business Cycles

[Symposium: Business Cycles]

By J. Bradford De Long

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

The Global Capital Market: Benefactor or Menace?

[Symposium: Globalization in Perspective]

By Maurice Obstfeld

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

This paper reviews the theoretical functions, history, and policy problems raised by the international capital market. The goal is to offer a perspective on both the considerable advantages the market offers and on the genuine hazards it poses, as well as...

Not So Demanding: Demand Structure and Firm Behavior

By Monika Mrázová and J. Peter Neary

American Economic Review, December 2017

We show that any well-behaved demand function can be represented by its "demand manifold," a smooth curve that relates the elasticity and convexity of demand. This manifold is a sufficient statistic for many comparative statics questions; leads naturally ...

Becoming the Neighbor Bidder: Endogenous Winner's Curse in Dynamic Mechanisms

By Alejandro Francetich

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

This paper addresses the problem of sequentially allocating time sensitive goods, or one-period leases on a durable good, among agents who compete through time and learn about the common component of their valuation privately through experience. I show th...

Sale Rates and Price Movements in Art Auctions

By Orley Ashenfelter and Kathryn Graddy

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper examines the relationship between sale rates and price shocks in art auctions. Using data on contemporary and impressionist art, we show that while sale rates appear to have little relationship to current prices, there exists a strong negative ...

Semiparametric Censored Regression Models

[Symposium: Econometric Tools]

By Kenneth Y. Chay and James L. Powell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

When data are censored, ordinary least squares regression can provide biased coefficient estimates. Maximum likelihood approaches to this problem are valid only if the error distribution is correctly specified, which can be problematic in practice. We rev...