Trade Costs, CO₂, and the Environment

By Joseph S. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

This paper quantifies how international trade affects CO2 emissions and analyzes the welfare consequences of regulating the CO2 emissions from shipping. To this end, the paper describes a model of trade and the environment, compiles ...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

By Steven J. Davis

American Economic Review, May 2010

Pinocchio's Pupil: Using Eyetracking and Pupil Dilation to Understand Truth Telling and Deception in Sender-Receiver Games

By Joseph Tao-yi Wang, Michael Spezio, and Colin F. Camerer

American Economic Review, June 2010

We report experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate. Subjects "overcommunicate" -- messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium. Eyetracking shows that senders look at payoffs i...

Rules, Communication, and Collusion: Narrative Evidence from the Sugar Institute Case

By David Genesove and Wallace P. Mullin

American Economic Review, June 2001

Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar-refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

The Persistence of Treatment Effects with Norm-Based Policy Instruments: Evidence from a Randomized Environmental Policy Experiment

By Paul J. Ferraro, Juan Jose Miranda, and Michael K. Price

American Economic Review, May 2011

Policymakers increasingly use norm-based messages to promote conservation efforts. Despite the apparent success of such strategies, empirical analyses have thus far focused exclusively on short-run effects. From a policy perspective, however, whether and ...

Explaining Charter School Effectiveness

By Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Lottery estimates suggest Massachusetts' urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond that of traditional urban public schools students, while nonurban charters reduce achievement from a higher baseline. The fact that urban charters are most eff...

On the Selection of Arbitrators

By Geoffroy de Clippel, Kfir Eliaz, and Brian Knight

American Economic Review, November 2014

A key feature of arbitration is the possibility for conflicting parties to participate in the selection of the arbitrator, the individual who will rule the case. We analyze this problem of the selection of arbitrators from the perspective of implementatio...

Clunkers or Junkers? Adverse Selection in a Vehicle Retirement Program

By Ryan Sandler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

Vehicle retirement programs have become popular tools of public policy for reducing pollution. The efficacy of these programs is difficult to measure, as it is difficult to tell how much a vehicle would have polluted otherwise. I estimate that counterfact...

The Power of Communication

By David Rahman

American Economic Review, November 2014

In this paper, I offer two ways in which firms can collude: secret monitoring and infrequent coordination. Such collusion is enforceable with intuitive communication protocols. I make my case in the context of a repeated Cournotoligopoly with flexible pr...

Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second-Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords

By Benjamin Edelman, Michael Ostrovsky, and Michael Schwarz

American Economic Review, March 2007

We investigate the "generalized second-price" (GSP) auction, a new mechanism used by search engines to sell online advertising. Although GSP looks similar to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, its properties are very different. Unlike the VCG m...

Manipulation of Social Program Eligibility

By Adriana Camacho and Emily Conover

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

We document how manipulation of a targeting system for social welfare programs evolves over time. First, there was strategic behavior of some local politicians in the timing of the household interviews around local elections. Then, there was corrupt beha...

Are There Environmental Benefits from Driving Electric Vehicles? The Importance of Local Factors

By Stephen P. Holland, Erin T. Mansur, Nicholas Z. Muller, and Andrew J. Yates

American Economic Review, December 2016

We combine a theoretical discrete-choice model of vehicle purchases, an econometric analysis of electricity emissions, and the AP2 air pollution model to estimate the geographic variation in the environmental benefits from driving electric vehicles. The s...

Flip-Flopping, Primary Visibility, and the Selection of Candidates

By Marina Agranov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

We present an incomplete information model of two-stage elections in which candidates can choose different platforms in primaries and general elections. Voters do not directly observe the chosen platforms, but infer the candidates’ ideologies from ob...

New Evidence on Taxes and the Timing of Birth

By Sara LaLumia, James M. Sallee, and Nicholas Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

This paper uses data from the universe of tax returns filed between 2001 and 2010 to test whether parents shift the timing of childbirth around the New Year to gain tax benefits. Filers have an incentive to shift births from early January into late Decemb...

Credit Markets, Credibility, and Economic Transformation

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By Guillermo A. Calvo and Jacob A. Frenkel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

This paper focuses on the special role that capital markets play in the transformation of centrally planned economies into well-functioning market economies. We demonstrate that underdeveloped credit markets inhibit the effectiveness of price reform, mone...

Retrospectives: Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

In this article, I discuss some earlier debates about the foundations of utility and its measurement, focusing on the contributions of Francis Y. Edgeworth (1845-1926), a famous British economist who was a leader in the development of a more mathematicall...

Decentralized Deterrence, with an Application to Labor Tax Auditing

By Edoardo Di Porto, Nicola Persico, and Nicolas Sahuguet

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

This paper studies a new strategic auditing game in which atomistic auditors maximize the success rate of audits, and provides a method to calibrate its parameters based on audit data. Calibrating the model to Italian auditing data, we provide an estim...

Initial Labor Market Conditions and Long-Term Outcomes for Economists

[Symposium: The Market for Economists]

By Paul Oyer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

Each year, graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk. Given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia, one mig...

Misallocation, Establishment Size, and Productivity

By Pedro Bento and Diego Restuccia

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

We consider a model of heterogeneous production units with endogenous entry and productivity investment to assess the quantitative impact of policy distortions: when the productivity elasticity of distortions increases from 0.09 in the United States to 0....