Minutes of the Annual Meeting: Denver, CO, January 8, 2011

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2011

Puzzles: Slot Machines, Zomepirac, Squash, and More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

This issue of puzzles can only be described as eclectic. The topics of the puzzles range from medical statistics to TV game shows to Las Vegas slot machines to squash to running around in squares. As usual, most puzzle answers are at the back. However, th...

The Mystique Surrounding the Central Bank's Balance Sheet, Applied to the European Crisis

By Ricardo Reis

American Economic Review, May 2013

A central bank's resource constraint bounds the dividends it can distribute by the present value of seignorage, which is a modest share of GDP. This is in spite of the mystique behind a central bank's balance sheet. Moreover, the statutes of the Federal R...

Policy Watch: Death Watch for the Estate Tax?

By William G. Gale and Joel B. Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

Competitive Altruism, Mentalizing, and Signaling

By Ed Hopkins

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

One explanation of altruism is that it arises from "mentalizing", the process of understanding the mental states of others. Another is based on sexual selection: altruism is a costly signal of good genes. This paper shows that these two arguments are s...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

Keeping It in the Family: Lineage Organization and the Scope of Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Jacob Moscona, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2017

We present evidence that the traditional structure of society is an important determinant of the scope of trust today. Within Africa, individuals belonging to ethnic groups that organized society using segmentary lineages exhibit a more limited scope of t...

Exchange Rates and Employment Instability: Evidence from Matched CPS Data

By Linda Goldberg, Joseph Tracy, and Stephanie Aaronson

American Economic Review, May 1999

Productivity Dispersion in Medicine and Manufacturing

By Amitabh Chandra, Amy Finkelstein, Adam Sacarny, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, May 2016

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that large differences in average productivity across US hospitals are the result of idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector which dull the role of market forces. Strikingly, however, we find that pro...

Growth, Size, and Openness: A Quantitative Approach

By Natalia Ramondo and Andrés Rodríguez-Clare

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Incentive Effects of Marginal Tax Rates: Evidence from the Interwar Era

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

This paper uses the interwar United States as a laboratory for investigating the incentive effects of marginal income tax rates. We examine the impact of the large changes in rates in this period on taxable income using time-series/cross-section analysis ...

The Search for Economics Talent: Doctoral Completion and Research Productivity

By Wayne A. Grove and Stephen Wu

American Economic Review, May 2007

Learning about the Future and Dynamic Efficiency

By Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Review, September 2009

We study an allocation problem where a set of objects needs to be allocated to agents arriving over time. The basic model is of the private, independent values type. The dynamically efficient allocation is implementable if the distribution of agents' valu...

Diffusion of Behavior and Equilibrium Properties in Network Games

By Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, May 2007

Sources of Inefficiency in Healthcare and Education

By Amitabh Chandra and Douglas Staiger

American Economic Review, May 2016

Healthcare and education exhibit wide variation in spending that is loosely associated with outcomes. We study supply-side explanations for such variation in in healthcare, and extend this discussion to how it might apply to education. In both sectors, va...

Estimating the Ex Ante Expected Returns to College

By Andrew J. Hussey and Omari H. Swinton

American Economic Review, May 2011

Rather than estimating the returns to obtaining a college degree, this paper treats the college education decision as an uncertain investment involving varying likelihoods of successful graduation. We predict earnings conditional on both graduating and no...

Perfect Competition and the Creativity of the Market

By Louis Makowski and Joseph M. Ostroy

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2001

From the perspective of the Walrasian general equilibrium model, entrepreneurial and opportunistic behavior seems foreign. Can the model be refashioned so that it can accommodate such behavior? Many would say no, but we argue the contrary. Indeed, we pres...

Non-Optimal Mechanism Design

By Jason D. Hartline and Brendan Lucier

American Economic Review, October 2015

The optimal allocation of resources in complex environments—like allocation of dynamic wireless spectrum, cloud computing services, and Internet advertising—is computationally challenging even given the true preferences of the participants. In...

Birth Rates and the Vietnam Draft

By Marianne P. Bitler and Lucie Schmidt

American Economic Review, May 2012

The Vietnam conflict was the defining event for a generation, with nearly 8 million Americans serving in the armed forces. A large literature in economics has focused on effects of Vietnam-Era service post-war, while little research looks at contemporaneo...

Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from US Agriculture

By Marshall Burke and Kyle Emerick

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

Understanding the potential impacts of climate change on economic outcomes requires knowing how agents might adapt to a changing climate. We exploit large variation in recent temperature and precipitation trends to identify adaptation to climate change in...