Power Dynamics in Organizations

By Jin Li, Niko Matouschek, and Michael Powell

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We examine an infinitely repeated game between a principal, who has the formal authority to decide on a project, and a biased agent, who is privately informed about what projects are available. The optimal relational contract speaks to how power is earned...

What's in a Name? Reputation as a Tradeable Asset

By Steven Tadelis

American Economic Review, June 1999

The author develops a model in which a firm's only asset is its name, which summarizes its reputation, and studies the forces that cause names to be valuable, tradable assets. An adverse selection model in which shifts of ownership are not observable guar...

Anomalies: A Mean-Reverting Walk Down Wall Street

By Werner F. M. De Bondt and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

Stock prices do appear to be somewhat predictable. In particular, if one takes a long-term perspective (3-7 years) or examines individual securities that have experienced extreme price movements, then stock returns display significant negative serial corr...

Technology Growth and Expenditure Growth in Health Care

By Amitabh Chandra and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

In the United States, health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates, yet health care spending relative to GDP has also grown more rapidly than in any other country. We develop a model of patient demand and supplier behavior to explain th...

Loan Syndication and Credit Cycles

By Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein

American Economic Review, May 2010

Social Status in Networks

By Nicole Immorlica, Rachel Kranton, Mihai Manea, and Greg Stoddard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We study social comparisons and status seeking in an interconnected society. Individuals take costly actions that have direct benefits and also confer social status. A new measure of interconnectedness--cohesion--captures the intensity of incentives for s...

Capacity Utilization

By Carol Corrado and Joe Mattey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

This article reviews how the Federal Reserve measures capacity utilization and explains why capacity utilization has been, and likely will remain, a useful indicator of inflationary pressures and business cycle fluctuations. The authors also explain why e...

Growth in a Time of Debt

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, May 2010

Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement among the Poor? Evidence from the Harlem Children's Zone

By Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identi...

Going to College to Avoid the Draft: The Unintended Legacy of the Vietnam War

By David Card and Thomas Lemieux

American Economic Review, May 2001

Procurement Design with Corruption

By Roberto Burguet

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

I investigate the design of optimal procurement mechanisms in the presence of corruption. After contracting with the sponsor, the contractor may bribe the inspector to misrepresent quality. The mechanism affects whether bribery occurs. I discuss the cases...

Is Free Trade Passe?

By Paul R. Krugman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations "I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage" and "I advocate Free Trade." Yet the case for free trade is currently more in doubt than at any time since the 1817 publicat...

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Socioeconomic Status, Poor Health in Childhood, and Human Capital Development

By Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

There are many possible pathways between parental education, income, and health, and between child health and education, but only some of them have been explored in the literature. This essay focuses on links between parental socioeconomic status (as m...

The Accelerated Benefits Demonstration: Impacts on the Employment of Disability Insurance Beneficiaries

By Michelle Stegman Bailey and Robert R. Weathers II

American Economic Review, May 2014

We use data from the Accelerated Benefits demonstration to estimate the impacts of providing newly entitled disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries with health insurance and additional services during the DI program's 24-month Medicare waiting period. Whi...

Majority Rule and Utilitarian Welfare

By Vijay Krishna and John Morgan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

We study the welfare properties of majority and supermajority rules when voting is costly and values, costs, and electorate sizes are all random. Unlike previous work, where the electorate size was either fixed or Poisson distributed, and exhibited no lim...

Separated at Girth: US Twin Estimates of the Effects of Birth Weight

By Heather Royer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

The fetal origins hypothesis asserts that nutrient deprivation in utero can raise chronic disease risk. Within economics, this hypothesis has gained acceptance as a leading explanation for the correlations between birth weight, a proxy for fetal nutrie...

Present-Biased Preferences and Credit Card Borrowing

By Stephan Meier and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

Some individuals borrow extensively on their credit cards. This paper tests whether present-biased time preferences correlate with credit card borrowing. In a field study, we elicit individual time preferences with incentivized choice experiments, and ...

Leader Punishment and Cooperation in Groups: Experimental Field Evidence from Commons Management in Ethiopia

By Michael Kosfeld and Devesh Rustagi

American Economic Review, February 2015

We conduct a social dilemma experiment in which real-world leaders can punish group members as a third party. Despite facing an identical environment, leaders are found to take remarkably different punishment approaches. The different leader types reve...

Projection Bias in Catalog Orders

By Michael Conlin, Ted O'Donoghue, and Timothy J. Vogelsang

American Economic Review, September 2007

Evidence suggests that people understand qualitatively how tastes change over time, but underestimate the magnitudes. This evidence is limited, however, to laboratory evidence or surveys of reported happiness. We test for such projection bias in field ...

Naked Exclusion and the Volatility of Innovation

By Christodoulos Stefanadis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

The analysis shows that the volatility of a potential entrant's innovation is an important parameter that shapes an incumbent supplier's exclusivity strategy. Higher volatility encourages the incumbent supplier to adopt an accommodation strategy rather th...