Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

By Andrew Postlewaite

American Economic Review, May 2016

Retrospectives: Price Indexes and General Exchange Values

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

The spreading use of indexes in the nineteenth century raised basic questions concerning the nature of absolute value in a neoclassical world of relative exchange values. Where Walsh held that the 'right' index for the general exchange value of money woul...

Incarceration Length, Employment, and Earnings

By Jeffrey R. Kling

American Economic Review, June 2006

This paper estimates effects of increases in incarceration length on employment and earnings prospects of individuals after their release from prison. I utilize a variety of research designs including controlling for observable factors and using instrumen...

Report of the Secretary for 2010

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2011

Asymmetric Contests with Conditional Investments

By Ron Siegel

American Economic Review, December 2010

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and R& races, among others. I provide an...

Correspondence

By Frederick Guy, Andrei Shleifer, Neil Perry, Andrew Metrick, Martin L. Weitzman, Barbara R. Bergmann, David Laidler, and George S. Tavlas

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Security Price Informativeness with Delegated Traders

By Gary Gorton, Ping He, and Lixin Huang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2010

Trade in securities markets is conducted by agents acting for principals, using "mark-to-market" contracts whereby performance is assessed using security market prices. We endogenize contract choices, information production, informed trading, and security...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

In Honor of the Nobel Laureates Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes: A Partial Differential Equation That Changed the World

By Robert A. Jarrow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

The Nobel Prize was given to Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes for discovering a new method for determining the value of an option. This is known as the Black-Merton-Scholes option pricing formula. The purpose of this essay is to explain why the Black...

Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By Alvin E. Roth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

This essay examines how repugnance sometimes constrains what transactions and markets we see. When my colleagues and I have helped design markets and allocation procedures, we have often found that distaste for certain kinds of transactions is a real cons...

Dispelling Some Misconceptions about Agricultural Trade Liberalization

By Stephen Tokarick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

There has been a great deal of public discussion over the impact that agricultural trade liberalization would likely have, especially on low-income countries. Unfortunately, the public discussion has been characterized by a number of misconceptions. This ...

Information Processing and Limited Liability

By Bartosz Mackowiak and Mirko Wiederholt

American Economic Review, May 2012

Decision-makers often face limited liability and thus know that their loss will be bounded. We study how limited liability affects the behavior of an agent who chooses how much information to acquire and process in order to take a good decision. We find t...

The Value of Information in Efficient Risk-Sharing Arrangements

By Edward E. Schlee

American Economic Review, June 2001

Suppose that agents share risks in competitive markets. We show that better information makes everyone worse off if the economy has a representative agent--that is, the economy's demand for state-contingent consumption equals the demand of a hypothetical ...

The Role of a Variable Input in the Relationship between Investment and Uncertainty

By Jaewoo Lee and Kwanho Shin

American Economic Review, June 2000

The Bidder's Curse: Reply

By Ulrike Malmendier

American Economic Review, April 2016

An important unresolved issue in the search literature is the question to what extent suboptimal search reflects "traditional search frictions," and to what extent it reflects behavioral biases. The distinction is important for assessing welfare, predi...

A Ricardo-Sraffa Paradigm Comparing Gains from Trade in Inputs and Finished Goods

By Paul A. Samuelson

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

Here is how the 1817 Ricardo comparative advantage trade benefit analysis has to be modified to take account of post-1960 Sraffian benefits from capital-using technologies. By bringing J. S. Mill's demand model up to date in terms of its implicit geometri...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Capital-Markets Crises and Economic Collapse in Emerging Markets: An Informational-Frictions Approach

By Guillermo A. Calvo and Enrique G. Mendoza

American Economic Review, May 2000

Inferring Rationales from Choice: Identification for Rational Shortlist Methods

By Rohan Dutta and Sean Horan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

A wide variety of choice behavior inconsistent with preference maximization can be explained by Manzini and Mariotti's Rational Shortlist Methods. Choices are made by sequentially applying a pair of asymmetric binary relations (rationales) to eliminate in...

Do Women Supply More Public Goods Than Men? Preliminary Experimental Evidence from Matrilineal and Patriarchal Societies

By Steffen Andersen, Erwin Bulte, Uri Gneezy, and John A. List

American Economic Review, May 2008