Market Design and the Evolution of the Combinatorial Clock Auction

By Lawrence M. Ausubel and Oleg V. Baranov

American Economic Review, May 2014

The Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA) is an important recent innovation in auction design which has been adopted for many spectrum auctions worldwide. Since its inception, the CCA has been in almost continual evolution. We begin by reviewing some importan...

Data Watch: The Panel Study of Income Dynamics

By Charles Brown, Greg J. Duncan, and Frank P. Stafford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

By collecting annual economic and demographic information from a large and representative sample of U.S. households for over a quarter century, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics has compiled a remarkably useful set of microdata. This article describes th...

American Economic Association Committee on Statistics (AEAStat): Annual Report--2010

By Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2011

Culture, Context, and the Taste for Redistribution

By Erzo F. P. Luttmer and Monica Singhal

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

Is culture an important determinant of preferences for redistribution? To separate culture from the economic and institutional environment ("context"), we relate immigrants' redistributive preferences to the average preference in their birth countries. We...

The End of Court-Ordered Desegregation

By Byron Lutz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

In response to three Supreme Court rulings in the early 1990s, numerous court-ordered desegregation plans have been terminated. Using a unique dataset and an event study research design, this paper explores the impact of these terminations. The results s...

(Over)insuring Modest Risks

By Justin Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

Despite the large literature on anomalies in risky choice, very little research has explored the relevance of these insights in real insurance markets. This paper uses new data on consumers' choices of deductibles for home insurance to provide evidence t...

Meeting Strangers and Friends of Friends: How Random Are Social Networks?

By Matthew O. Jackson and Brian W. Rogers

American Economic Review, June 2007

We present a dynamic model of network formation where nodes find other nodes with whom to form links in two ways: some are found uniformly at random, while others are found by searching locally through the current structure of the network (e.g., meetin...

The Impacts of Microfinance: Evidence from Joint-Liability Lending in Mongolia

By Orazio Attanasio, Britta Augsburg, Ralph De Haas, Emla Fitzsimons, and Heike Harmgart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We present evidence from a randomized field experiment in rural Mongolia to assess the poverty impacts of a joint-liability microcredit program targeted at women. We find a positive impact of access to group loans on female entrepreneurship and household ...

The New Keynesian Synthesis

[Symposium: Keynesian Economics Today]

By David Romer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

The new Keynesians made more rapid progress in understanding the microeconomics of unemployment than in understanding the microeconomics of nominal price rigidity. But the past five years have seen important breakthroughs in this second area. This paper w...

Payment Size, Negative Equity, and Mortgage Default

By Andreas Fuster and Paul S. Willen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

This paper studies the treatment effect of monthly payment size on mortgage default, using a sample of adjustable-rate loans that experienced large payment reductions thanks to the recent low interest rate environment. Payment size has an economically lar...

Sequential Markets, Market Power, and Arbitrage

By Koichiro Ito and Mar Reguant

American Economic Review, July 2016

We develop a framework to characterize strategic behavior in sequential markets under imperfect competition and restricted entry in arbitrage. Our theory predicts that these two elements can generate a systematic price premium. We test the model predictio...

On the Potential of Neuroeconomics: A Critical (but Hopeful) Appraisal

By B. Douglas Bernheim

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

This paper attempts to identify and articulate the specific ways in which the emerging field of neuroeconomics might shed light on traditional positive and normative questions in economics, as well as the likely limitations of its potential contributio...

One Laptop per Child at Home: Short-Term Impacts from a Randomized Experiment in Peru

By Diether W. Beuermann, Julian Cristia, Santiago Cueto, Ofer Malamud, and Yyannu Cruz-Aguayo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

This paper presents results from a randomized controlled trial whereby approximately 1,000 OLPC XO laptops were provided for home use to children attending primary schools in Lima, Peru. The intervention increased access and use of home computers, with so...

Does Studying Economics Discourage Cooperation? Watch What We Do, Not What We Say or How We Play

By Anthony M. Yezer, Robert S. Goldfarb, and Paul J. Poppen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

Based on what economics students say and how they play games, economics students appear less cooperative than other students. But appearances can be deceiving: the evidence in this paper indicates that the actual behavior of economics students is more coo...

Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem with Incomplete Preferences

By Eric Danan, Thibault Gajdos, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We provide a generalization of Harsanyi's (1955) aggregation theorem to the case of incomplete preferences at the individual and social level. Individuals and society have possibly incomplete expected utility preferences that are represented by sets of ex...

Iron Deficiency and Schooling Attainment in Peru

By Alberto Chong, Isabelle Cohen, Erica Field, Eduardo Nakasone, and Maximo Torero

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

Do nutritional deficiencies contribute to the intergenerational persistence of poverty by reducing the earnings potential of future generations? To address this question, we made available supplemental iron pills at a health center in rural Peru and encou...

Thirty Years of Prospect Theory in Economics: A Review and Assessment

By Nicholas C. Barberis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, published a paper in Econometrica titled "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk." The paper presented a new model of risk attitudes called "prospect theory," which elegantly captured the e...

Pass-Through in Retail and Wholesale

By Emi Nakamura

American Economic Review, May 2008

Sacred Cars? Cost-Effective Regulation of Stationary and Nonstationary Pollution Sources

By Meredith Fowlie, Christopher R. Knittel, and Catherine Wolfram

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

For political and practical reasons, environmental regulations sometimes treat point-source polluters, such as power plants, differently from mobile-source polluters, such as vehicles. This paper measures the extent of this regulatory asymmetry in the cas...

Federalism as a Commitment to Reserving Market Incentives

[Symposium: Fiscal Federalism]

By Yingyi Qian and Barry R. Weingast

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

The authors advance a new perspective in the study of federalism. Their approach views federalism as a governance solution of the state to credibly preserving market incentives. Market incentives are preserved if the state is credibly prevented from compr...