Views among Economists: Professional Consensus or Point-Counterpoint?

By Roger Gordon and Gordon B. Dahl

American Economic Review, May 2013

To what degree do economists disagree about key economic questions? We provide evidence by using the responses to a series of questions posed to a distinguished panel of economists put together by the Chicago School of Business. Based on our analysis, we ...

Daron Acemoglu: 2005 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Robert Shimer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

Daron Acemoglu, winner of the 2005 John Bates Clark Medal, uses theoretical and empirical analysis to tackle critical issues in a variety of fields in economics, including labor economics, macroeconomics, and political economy. His unparalleled combinatio...

Pay as You Go: Prepaid Metering and Electricity Expenditures in South Africa

By B. Kelsey Jack and Grant Smith

American Economic Review, May 2015

High rates of customer default on utility bills present a barrier to the expansion of electricity access in the developing world. Pre-paid electricity metering offers a technological solution to ensuring timely payment. Using an eleven-year panel of pre-p...

The Liabilities and Risks of State-Sponsored Pension Plans

By Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua D. Rauh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

As of December 2008, state governments had approximately $1.94 trillion set aside in pension funds for their employees. How does the value of these assets compare to the present value of states' pension liabilities? Just as future Social Security and Medi...

The Frontier of Telecommunications Deregulation: Small Countries Leading the Pack

[Symposium: Telecommunications Deregulation Around The World]

By Pablo T. Spiller and Carlo G. Cardilli

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

Interconnection, equal access, unbundling, and industry structure are four key determinants of facilities-based competition in telecommunications. Using these building blocks, this paper analyzes the differences in telecommunications regulatory regimes in...

The Currency of Reciprocity: Gift Exchange in the Workplace

By Sebastian Kube, Michel André Maréchal, and Clemens Puppe

American Economic Review, June 2012

What determines reciprocity in employment relations? We conducted a controlled field experiment to measure the extent to which monetary and nonmonetary gifts affect workers' performance. We find that nonmonetary gifts have a much stronger impact than mon...

Why Did the Ruble Collapse in August 1998?

By Padma Desai

American Economic Review, May 2000

Crowded Colleges and College Crowd-Out: The Impact of Public Subsidies on the Two-Year College Market

By Stephanie Riegg Cellini

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009

This study assesses the impact of an increase in funding for public community colleges on the market for two-year college education, considering both the effect on community college enrollments and on the number of proprietary schools in a market. I dr...

Political Economy at Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations?

By Michael D. Makowsky and Thomas Stratmann

American Economic Review, March 2009

Speeding tickets are determined not only by the speed of the offender, but also by incentives faced by police officers and their vote-maximizing principals. We hypothesize that police officers issue fines more frequently when drivers have a higher opportu...

The Impact of Social Ties on Group Interactions: Evidence from Minimal Groups and Randomly Assigned Real Groups

By Lorenz Goette, David Huffman, and Stephan Meier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2012

Economists are increasingly interested in how group membership affects individual behavior. The standard method assigns individuals to "minimal" groups, i.e. arbitrary labels, in a lab. But real group often involve social interactions leading to social ti...

Manipulation and Equity-Based Compensation

By Lin Peng and Ailsa Roell

American Economic Review, May 2008

Trade, Domestic Frictions, and Scale Effects

By Natalia Ramondo, Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, and Milagro Saborío-Rodríguez

American Economic Review, October 2016

Because of scale effects, idea-based growth models imply that larger countries should be much richer than smaller ones. New trade models share the same counterfactual feature. In fact, new trade models exhibit other counterfactual implications associated ...

Search in Asset Markets: Market Structure, Liquidity, and Welfare

By Ricardo Lagos and Guillaume Rocheteau

American Economic Review, May 2007

Why Can't US Airlines Make Money?

By Severin Borenstein

American Economic Review, May 2011

US airlines have lost nearly $60 billion ($2009) in domestic markets since the 1978 deregulation, most of it in the last decade. The dismal financial record challenges the economics of deregulation. I examine some of the common explanations among industry...

The Science of Monetary Policy: A New Keynesian Perspective

By Richard Clarida, Jordi Gali, and Mark Gertler

Journal of Economic Literature, December 1999

The paper reviews the recent literature on monetary policy rules. We exposit the monetary policy design problem within a simple baseline theoretical framework. We then consider the implications of adding various real world complications. Among other thing...

Corporate Governance Reforms in Continental Europe

[Symposium: New Rules for Corporate Governance]

By Luca Enriques and Paolo Volpin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

The fundamental problem of corporate governance in the United States is to alleviate the conflict of interest between dispersed small shareowners and powerful controlling managers. The fundamental corporate governance in continental Europe and in most of ...

Awarding Price, Contract Performance, and Bids Screening: Evidence from Procurement Auctions

By Francesco Decarolis

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

This paper presents evidence on the perverse trade-off that first price auctions induce between low prices at the awarding stage and poor ex post performance when bids are not binding commitments. By exploiting the different timing with which first pri...

News Aggregators and Competition among Newspapers on the Internet

By Doh-Shin Jeon and Nikrooz Nasr

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

This paper studies how news aggregators affect the quality choices of newspapers competing on the Internet. To provide a micro-foundation for the role of the aggregator, we build a model of multiple issues where newspapers choose their quality on each iss...

The Effects of Investing Social Security Funds in the Stock Market When Fixed Costs Prevent Some Households from Holding Stocks

By Andrew B. Abel

American Economic Review, March 2001

With fixed costs of participating in the stock market, consumers with high income will participate in the stock market, but consumers with lower income will not participate. If a fully funded defined-contribution Social Security system tries to exploit th...

The Impact of Global Warming on Agriculture: A Ricardian Analysis: Comment

By John Quiggin and John K. Horowitz

American Economic Review, September 1999