Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013

Do Expiring Budgets Lead to Wasteful Year-End Spending? Evidence from Federal Procurement

By Jeffrey B. Liebman and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, November 2017

Many organizations have budgets that expire at the end of the fiscal year and may face incentives to rush to spend resources on low-quality projects at year's end. We test these predictions using data on procurement spending by the US federal government...

Technology and the Changing Family: A Unified Model of Marriage, Divorce, Educational Attainment, and Married Female Labor-Force Participation

By Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santos

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2016

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being more significant for noncollege-educated individuals versus college-educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the noncollege-educated. Additionally, positive assortative mating has risen. Incom...

Rational Inattention and Organizational Focus

By Wouter Dessein, Andrea Galeotti, and Tano Santos

American Economic Review, June 2016

This paper studies optimal communication flows in organizations. A production process can be coordinated ex ante, by letting agents stick to a prespecified plan of action. Alternatively, agents may adapt to task-specific shocks, in which case tasks must b...

Behavioral Welfare Economics and Redistribution

By Marc Fleurbaey and Erik Schokkaert

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

Behavioral economics has shaken the view that individuals have well-defined, consistent and stable preferences. This raises a challenge for welfare economics, which takes as a key postulate that individual preferences should be respected. We argue, in ...

The Virtues of Hesitation: Optimal Timing in a Non-stationary World

By Urmee Khan and Maxwell B. Stinchcombe

American Economic Review, March 2015

In many economic, political, and social situations, circumstances change at random points in time, reacting is costly, and reactions appropriate to present circumstances may become inappropriate upon future changes, requiring further costly reaction. Wait...

A Patent System for Both Diffusion and Exclusion

[Symposium: Intellectual Property]

By Janusz A. Ordover

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Public policy analysis of optimal patent regimes is often framed as a tradeoff between static and dynamic efficiency. In this analytical framework, weak patent protection and strict antitrust policy are taken to be directed toward static concerns, while p...

Correspondence

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Product and Occupational Liability

[Symposium: The Economics of Liability]

By W. Kip Viscusi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

Increased liability for risks posed by jobs and products has transformed the cost structure of job and product markets. Liability costs used to be an incidental expense; now they are a factor of substantial economic consequence. The costs associated with ...

Is an Automaker's Road to Bankruptcy Paved with Customers' Beliefs?

By Ali Hortaçsu, Gregor Matvos, Chaehee Shin, Chad Syverson, and Sriram Venkataraman

American Economic Review, May 2011

We explore the role the feedback loop between firms' financial health and consumers' demand for their products plays in the auto market. We construct a simple model of an automaker making pricing and debt service (continuation) decisions while recognizing...

Does Market Experience Eliminate Market Anomalies? The Case of Exogenous Market Experience

By John A. List

American Economic Review, May 2011

A vibrant literature has emerged that suggests willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures of value are quite different for inexperienced consumers but that value differences erode with market experience. One potential shortcoming of this litera...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Perspectives

By David Autor

American Economic Review, May 2011

Vertical Targeting and Leakage in Carbon Policy

By James B. Bushnell and Erin T. Mansur

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper examines the intersection between two aspects of climate policy design. The first is the point of regulation: should it be placed on pollution sources, carbon-rich inputs, or consumers? The second aspect concerns the external effects of a local...

Why People Vote: Ethical Motives and Social Incentives

By S. Nageeb Ali and Charles Lin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2013

Some individuals vote because they are motivated by a civic duty to do so, whereas others may vote because they wish to appear prosocial to others. This paper proposes a simple framework that captures these motivations, and provides results consistent ...

A Review of Tito Boeri, Lans Bovenberg, Benoît Coeuré, and Andrew Roberts's Dealing with the New Giants and Peter J. Orszag, Mark Iwry, and William G. Gale's Aging Gracefully

By Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2008

Global aging will impose greater economic demands on the young and may entail dramatic consumption shortfalls for the old. Against this gloomy backdrop, many analysts hail the world’s funded pension systems as a means to protect future retirement sec...

The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka

By Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

A field experiment in Sri Lanka provides informal firms incentives to formalize. Information about the registration process and reimbursement of direct costs does not increase registration. Payments equivalent to one-half to one month (alternatively, two...

Should Cash Transfers Be Conditional? Conditionality, Preventive Care, and Health Outcomes

By Orazio P. Attanasio, Veruska Oppedisano, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

We study a Conditional Cash Transfer program in which the cash transfers to the mother only depend on the fulfillment of the national preventive visit schedule by her children born before she registered in the program. We estimate that preventive visits o...

The Costs of Sovereign Default: Evidence from Argentina

By Benjamin Hébert and Jesse Schreger

American Economic Review, October 2017

We estimate the causal effect of sovereign default on the equity returns of Argentine firms. We identify this effect by exploiting changes in the probability of Argentine sovereign default induced by legal rulings in the case of NML Capital, Ltd. v. Repub...

Regulating Infrastructure: The Impact on Risk and Investment

By Graeme Guthrie

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2006

The last thirty years have witnessed a fundamental change in the regulation of infrastructure industries. Whereas firms were subject to rate of return regulation and protected from entry in the past, they now face various forms of incentive regulation, ...

Covenants without Courts: Enforcing Residential Segregation with Legally Unenforceable Agreements

By Richard R. W. Brooks

American Economic Review, May 2011

Racial restrictive covenants are private agreements prohibiting sale, rental, use or occupancy of properties by persons of designated races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions. Widely acknowledged for facilitating residential segregation, the Suprem...