Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

By Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine

American Economic Review, December 2015

This paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant on teen childbearing. Our main analysis relates geographic variation in changes in teen childbearing rates to viewership of the show. We impl...

Conflicts and Choices in Biodiversity Preservation

[Symposium: Endangered Species Act]

By Andrew Metrick and Martin L. Weitzman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

The purpose of this article is to examine the preservation of biodiversity as an economic problem. Using a very simple prototype model, the authors discuss how to include diversity in the objective function and how to develop a simple cost-benefit ranking...

Formal versus Informal Monitoring in Teams

By Alex Gershkov and Eyal Winter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

In this paper we analyze a principal's optimal monitoring strategies in a team environment. In doing so we study the interaction between formal monitoring and informal (peer) monitoring. We show that if the technology satisfies complementarity, peer monit...

Set-Asides and Subsidies in Auctions

By Susan Athey, Dominic Coey, and Jonathan Levin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of US Forest Service timber auctions. The model fits the data well both within the sample of unrestricted sales ...

The Double Diamond Paradox

By Daniel Garcia, Jun Honda, and Maarten Janssen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2017

We study vertical relations in markets with consumer and retailer search. We obtain three important new results. First, we provide a novel explanation for price dispersion that does not depend on some form of heterogeneity among consumers. Price dispersio...

Racial Realism: A Review Essay on John Skrentny's After Civil Rights

By Kevin Lang

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2015

In his valuable contribution, After Civil Rights, John Skrentny shows that in many sectors of the labor market, race is used in ways that were unanticipated when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted. With separate chapters on the professions and...

Binary Payment Schemes: Moral Hazard and Loss Aversion

By Fabian Herweg, Daniel Müller, and Philipp Weinschenk

American Economic Review, December 2010

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where...

Back on the Rails: Competition and Productivity in State-Owned Industry

By Sanghamitra Das, Kala Krishna, Sergey Lychagin, and Rohini Somanathan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We use a proprietary dataset on the floor-level operations at the largest rail mill in India to study the response of productivity to the threat of entry. Output per active shift increased by 28 percent over 3 years with minimal changes in physical cap...

Global Capital Markets in the Long Run: A Review of Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor's Global Capital Markets

By Jeffrey G. Williamson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2007

Written by Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor, Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis, and Growth was a much-needed book that will be cited extensively by those with interests in the long run evolution of the world financial capital market. The ...

Report: Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP)

By Marjorie B. McElroy

American Economic Review, May 2016

Experiments on Decisions under Uncertainty: A Theoretical Framework

By Eran Shmaya and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, July 2016

The analysis of lab data entails a joint test of the underlying theory and of subjects' conjectures regarding the experimental design itself, how subjects frame the experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing such conjectures. We use expe...

Management Quality and Firm Hierarchy in Industry Equilibrium

By Cheng Chen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

I incorporate a monitoring-based firm hierarchy into an industry equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. I then use the theory to study aggregate impacts of an economy-wide improvement in monitoring efficiency. This shock generates a selection effect,...

Zipf's Law and the Growth of Cities

By Xavier Gabaix

American Economic Review, May 1999

Leakage, Welfare, and Cost-Effectiveness of Carbon Policy

By Kathy Baylis, Don Fullerton, and Daniel H. Karney

American Economic Review, May 2013

We extend the model of Fullerton, Karney, and Baylis (2012) to explore cost-effectiveness of unilateral climate policy in the presence of leakage. We ignore the welfare gain from reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and focus on the welfare cost of the emis...

The Judge, the Politician, and the Press: Newspaper Coverage and Criminal Sentencing across Electoral Systems

By Claire S. H. Lim, James M. Snyder Jr., and David Strömberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

We study how media environments interact with political institutions that structure the accountability of public officials. Specifically, we quantify media influence on the behavior of US state court judges. We analyze around 1.5 million criminal sente...

Do College Graduates Serving as Village Officials Help Rural China?

By Guojun He and Shaoda Wang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

This study estimates the effect of improved bureaucrat quality on poverty alleviation by exploring a unique human capital reallocation policy in China—the College Graduate Village Officials (CGVOs) program. We find that introducing CGVOs into the vi...

Incomplete Environmental Regulation, Imperfect Competition, and Emissions Leakage

By Meredith L. Fowlie

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009

Environmental regulation of industrial pollution is often incomplete; regulations apply to only a subset of facilities contributing to a pollution problem. Policymakers are increasingly concerned about the emissions leakage that may occur if unregulate...

Why Don't Households Smooth Consumption? Evidence from a $25 Million Experiment

By Jonathan A. Parker

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2017

This paper evaluates theoretical explanations for the propensity of households to increase spending in response to the arrival of predictable, lump-sum payments, using households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel who received $25 million in randomly distribut...

Stability in Supply Chain Networks

By Michael Ostrovsky

American Economic Review, June 2008

This paper studies matching in vertical networks, generalizing the theory of matching in two-sided markets. It gives sufficient conditions for the existence of stable networks and presents an algorithm for finding two of them. One is the best stable ne...

Vertical Integration and Input Flows

By Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortaçsu, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, April 2014

We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate firms' ownership of production chains. It does not appear that vertical ownership is primarily used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chai...