Anomalies: Saving, Fungibility, and Mental Accounts

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

Last New Year's day, after a long evening of rooting the right team to victory in the Orange Bowl, I was lucky enough to win $300 in a college football betting pool. I then turned to the important matter of splurging the proceeds wisely. Would a case of c...

Running on Empty? Financial Leverage and Product Quality in the Supermarket Industry

By David A. Matsa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2011

This paper examines whether debt financing can undermine a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of a retailer's quality. Using US consumer price index microdata...

Balanced Growth Despite Uzawa

By Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, Ezra Oberfield, and Thomas Sampson

American Economic Review, April 2017

The evidence for the United States points to balanced growth despite falling investment good prices and a less-than-unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawa's theorem...

The Impact of Nearly Universal Insurance Coverage on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Medicare

By David Card, Carlos Dobkin, and Nicole Maestas

American Economic Review, December 2008

The onset of Medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the US population. These changes lead to increases in the use of medical services, with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by ty...

Moving to Job Opportunities? The Effect of "Ban the Box" on the Composition of Cities

By Jennifer L. Doleac and Benjamin Hansen

American Economic Review, May 2017

Jurisdictions across the United States have adopted "ban the box" (BTB) policies preventing employers from conducting criminal background checks until late in the job application process. Their primary goal is to increase employment for those with crimina...

The Noise Trader Approach to Finance

[Symposium: Bubbles]

By Andrei Shleifer and Lawrence H. Summers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

This paper reviews an alternative to the efficient markets approach that we and others have recently pursued. Our approach rests on two assumptions. First, some investors are not fully rational and their demand for risky assets is affected by their belief...

Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity

By Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

This paper shows that reciprocity has powerful implications for many economic domains. It is an important determinant in the enforcement of contracts and social norms and enhances the possibilities of collective action greatly. Reciprocity may render the ...

Policy Watch: Alcohol and Cigarette Taxes

By Michael Grossman, Jody L. Sindelar, John Mullahy, and Richard Anderson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

Increased excise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol have been suggested as a means to finance (at least partially) the Clinton administration's proposed program of health care reform. We consider the revenue potential of cigarette and alcohol tax hikes and e...

Nonconvexities, Retirement, and the Elasticity of Labor Supply

By Richard Rogerson and Johanna Wallenius

American Economic Review, June 2013

We consider two life cycle models of labor supply that use nonconvexities to generate retirement. In each case we derive a link between hours worked prior to retirement, the intertemporal elasticity of substitution for labor (IES), and the size of the non...

Returns to Education: Evidence from UK Twins: Comment

By Vikesh Amin

American Economic Review, June 2011

In an article published in the American Economic Review, Dorothe Bonjour et al. (2003) used a dataset on female monozygotic twins and showed that the within-twin estimated return to one year of education was 7.7 percent and statistically significant at t...

Naked Exclusion: Comment

By Ilya R. Segal and Michael D. Whinston

American Economic Review, March 2000

Organizations and Markets

[Symposium: Organizations and Economics]

By Herbert A. Simon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

The economies of modern industrialized society can more appropriately be labeled organizational economies than market economies. Thus, even market-driven capitalist economies need a theory of organizations as much as they need a theory of markets. The att...

Possible Reforms for Financing Long-Term Care

[Symposium: Health Economics]

By William J. Scanlon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

This paper considers the market for long-term care services to treat and compensate for chronic health conditions and disabilities. This paper describes how the long-term care market has evolved and the resulting implications for expenditure control. It r...

Regulation of Insurance with Adverse Selection and Switching Costs: Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Maria Polyakova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

I take advantage of regulatory and pricing dynamics in Medicare Part D to explore interactions among adverse selection, inertia, and regulation. I first document novel evidence of adverse selection and switching frictions within Part D using detailed admi...

Price Setting in Online Markets: Basic Facts, International Comparisons, and Cross-Border Integration

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Oleksandr Talavera

American Economic Review, January 2017

We document basic facts about prices in online markets in the United States and Canada, which is a rapidly growing segment of the retail sector. Relative to prices in regular stores, prices in online markets are more flexible and exhibit stronger pass-thr...

Corrigendum: Mechanisms and Impacts of Gender Peer Effects at School

By Victor Lavy and Analía Schlosser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

A Measure of Robustness to Misspecification

By Susan Athey and Guido Imbens

American Economic Review, May 2015

Researchers often report estimates and standard errors for the object of interest (such as a treatment effect) based on a single specification of a statistical model. We propose a systematic approach to assessing sensitivity to specification. We construct...

Two Cheers for CSWEP?

By Barbara R. Bergmann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The achievements (or lack thereof) of the AEA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) are compared to those of analogous committees in three of our sister disciplines. In psychology, sociology, and history, committees of wom...

Affirmative Action Exemptions and Capacity Constrained Firms

By Justin Marion

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

This paper studies how affirmative action exemptions in public procurement can improve efficiency and government expenditures without harming disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) utilization. I examine a unique program employed by the Iowa Department o...

Optimal Beliefs, Asset Prices, and the Preference for Skewed Returns

By Markus K. Brunnermeier, Christian Gollier, and Jonathan A. Parker

American Economic Review, May 2007