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Is Wikipedia Biased?

By Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu

American Economic Review, May 2012

This study empirically examines whether Wikipedia has a neutral point of view. It develops a method for measuring the slant of 28 thousand articles about US politics. In its earliest years, Wikipedia's political entries lean Democrat on average. The slant...

Symposium on Takeovers

[Symposium: Takeovers]

By Hal R. Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

Of the hundred largest mergers and acquisitions on record up to 1984, 65 occurred between 1981 and 1983, and only 11 occurred prior to 1979. During the 1981-84 period, there were at least 45 transactions of over a billion dollars apiece; prior to this per...

How Strong Are Weak Patents?

By Joseph Farrell and Carl Shapiro

American Economic Review, September 2008

We study the welfare economics of probabilistic patents that are licensed without a full determination of validity. We examine the social value of instead determining patent validity before licensing to downstream technology users, in terms of deadweig...

Detecting Illegal Arms Trade

By Stefano DellaVigna and Eliana La Ferrara

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2010

We propose a method to detect illegal arms trade based on investor knowledge. We focus on countries under arms embargo and identify events that suddenly increase or decrease conflict intensity. If a weapon-making company is trading illegally, an event tha...

Ideologues Beat Idealists

By Sambuddha Ghosh and Vinayak Tripathi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2012

Our model considers a majority election between two candidates—an ideologue committed to a fixed policy and an idealist who implements the ex post choice of the majority. Voters are aware that their individual rankings of policies may change after t...