Moderating Political Extremism: Single Round versus Runoff Elections under Plurality Rule

By Massimo Bordignon, Tommaso Nannicini, and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, August 2016

We compare single round versus runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under runoff elections, the number of political candidates is larger, but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy, and he...

But Who Will Guard the Guardians?

By Leonid Hurwicz

American Economic Review, June 2008

Should the Euro Area Be Run as a Closed Economy?

By Carlo Favero and Francesco Giavazzi

American Economic Review, May 2008

Corporate Audits and How to Fix Them

By Joshua Ronen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Auditors are supposed to be watchdogs, but in the last decade or so, they sometimes looked like lapdogs -- more interested in serving the companies they audited than in assuring a flow of accurate information to investors. The auditing profession is based...

The Public and Private Sectors in the Process of Innovation: Theory and Evidence from the Mouse Genetics Revolution

By Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Julian Kolev, Fiona Murray, and Scott Stern

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Cabals of a Few or the Confusion of a Multitude: The Institutional Trade-Off between Representation and Governance

By Leah Brooks, Justin Phillips, and Maxim Sinitsyn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

Our model illustrates how political institutions trade off between the competing goals of representation and governance, where governance is the responsiveness of an institution to a single pivotal voter. We use exogenous variation from the 30-year histor...

Prostitutes and Brides?

By Raj Arunachalam and Manisha Shah

American Economic Review, May 2008

Behind This Structural Boom: The Role of Asset Valuations

By Edmund S. Phelps

American Economic Review, May 1999

Subjective Probabilities on a State Space

By Edi Karni

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2011

This paper extends the analytical framework of Karni (2011) to include a state space and advances a choice-based definition of subjective probabilities on this space. These probabilities represent the beliefs of Bayesian decision makers regarding the lik...

Some Basic Economics of National Security

By Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel

American Economic Review, May 2013

We define national security (NS) as public policies that protect the safety or welfare of a nation's citizens from substantial threats. NS capital provides societal insurance against widespread harm or catastrophe, so optimal NS investments may have very ...

The Illusory Effects of Saving Incentives on Saving

[Symposium: Government Incentives for Saving]

By Eric M. Engen, William G. Gale, and John Karl Scholz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

The authors evaluate research on how tax-based saving incentives (IRAs and 401(k)s) affect saving. Previous research overstates the impact of the incentives on saving by failing to account for several issues: households with saving incentives have stronge...

Issues Every Plan to Reform Health Care Financing Must Confront

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

This paper focuses on three main issues of fundamental health care reform. First, should experience rating--the linkage of premiums to actual loss experience--be retained? Despite widespread support for experience rating among economists, the paper argues...

Minutes of the Annual Meeting: San Francisco, CA, January 4, 2009

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2009

Fast-Track Authority and International Trade Negotiations

By Paola Conconi, Giovanni Facchini, and Maurizio Zanardi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

We develop a simple model of trade relations in which legislators with different stakes in import-competing and export industries decide whether to grant fast-track authority (FTA) to the president, giving up the power to amend international trade agreeme...

Risk Sharing and Network Formation

By Marcel Fafchamps and Flore Gubert

American Economic Review, May 2007

A "Dual Self" Representation for Stochastic Temptation

By Kalyan Chatterjee and R. Vijay Krishna

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

We consider the following two-period problem of self-control. In the first period, an individual has to decide on the set of feasible choices from which she will select one in the second period. In the second period, the individual might choose an alte...

On the Robustness of Anchoring Effects in WTP and WTA Experiments

By Drew Fudenberg, David K. Levine, and Zacharias Maniadis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2012

We reexamine the effects of the anchoring manipulation of Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2003) on the evaluation of common market goods and find very weak anchoring effects. We perform the same manipulation on the evaluation of binary lotteries, and fin...

Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: Denver, CO, January 6, 2011

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2011

Distinguished Fellow: Herbert Scarf's Contributions to Economics

By Kenneth J. Arrow and Timothy J. Kehoe

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

For the past thirty-five years, Herbert Scarf has made fundamental contributions in studies of inventories, the core, computation of equilibria, and integer programming. His work has simultaneously sought the most general and abstract formulations while s...

Differential Impacts of Immigrants on Native Black and White Workers

By Paul Ong and Don Mar

American Economic Review, May 2007