Affiliation and Entry in First-Price Auctions with Heterogeneous Bidders: An Analysis of Merger Effects

By Tong Li and Bingyu Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We study the effects of mergers in timber sale auctions in Oregon. We propose an entry and bidding model within the affiliated private value (APV) framework and with heterogeneous bidders, and establish existence of the entry equilibrium and existence and...

Does Abolishing User Fees Lead to Improved Health Status? Evidence from Post-apartheid South Africa

By Shinsuke Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Whether user fees for health services should be charged or abolished for the poor has recently been debated. This study examines the impact on child health status of removing user fees in South Africa. Our main innovation is to exploit plausibly exogenous...

The Obstinate Passion of Foreign Exchange Professionals: Technical Analysis

By Lukas Menkhoff and Mark P. Taylor

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2007

Technical analysis involves the prediction of asset price movements from inductive analysis of past movements. We establish a number of stylized facts, including that technical analysis is widespread in the foreign exchange market and that it may be pr...

Opportunities, Welfare, and Social Justice: A Review of Fishkin's Bottlenecks

By François Maniquet

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

In his Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, Joseph Fishkin claims he presents an entirely new way of thinking about equality of opportunity. The core of the new theory is the call for opportunity pluralism, which consists in enlarging th...

Correspondence: National Science Foundation Grants for Economics

By Milton Friedman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

Correspondence regarding: National Science Foundation Grants for Economics

Renewable Natural Resource Management and Use without Markets

By Gardner M. Brown

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2000

Natural resources, by their nature, are not readily bent to the status of private property. Efficient resource use is complicated by jurisdictional externalities, public goods, non-use values, and beneficiaries spatially separated from the location of res...

Walking the Tightrope on Medicare Reform

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

A central controversy in the debate about Medicare is whether the program spends too much money or whether instead it should be expanded to cover more. I consider the value of increased Medicare spending. I argue that on average Medicare spending is worth...

Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, and Julia Tobias

American Economic Review, June 2012

This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hy...

Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia

By Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang and Feng Zhu

American Economic Review, June 2011

The literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size. We find, however, that after an exogenous reduction of group size at Chinese Wikipedia, the nonblocked contributors d...

Markets: The Fulton Fish Market

By Kathryn Graddy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

The Fulton Fish Market was a colorful part of the New York City landscape that operated on Fulton Street in Manhattan for over 150 years. In 2005 the market moved from the South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan to Hunts Point in the South Bronx. The Fult...

Bank Leverage and Social Welfare

By Lawrence Christiano and Daisuke Ikeda

American Economic Review, May 2016

We describe a general equilibrium model in which an agency problem arises because bankers must exert an unobserved and costly effort to perform their task. Suppose aggregate banker net worth is too low to insulate creditors from bad outcomes on their bala...

Inventories, Lumpy Trade, and Large Devaluations

By George Alessandria, Joseph P. Kaboski, and Virgiliu Midrigan

American Economic Review, December 2010

We document that delivery lags and transaction-level economics of scale matter for international trade, leading importers to import infrequently and hold additional inventory. In a model with these frictions calibrated to empirical measures of inventory a...

The Restoration of Welfare Economics

By Anthony B. Atkinson

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper argues that welfare economics should be restored to a prominent place on the agenda of economists, and should occupy a central role in the teaching of economics. Economists should provide justification for the ethical criteria underlying welfar...

The Probability of Finding a Job

By Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, May 2008

The New Patent Intermediaries: Platforms, Defensive Aggregators, and Super-Aggregators

[Symposium: Patents]

By Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

The patent market consists mainly of privately negotiated, bilateral transactions, either sales or cross-licenses, between large companies. There is no eBay, Amazon, New York Stock Exchange, or Kelley's Blue Book equivalent for patents, and when buyers a...

Five Facts about Value-Added Exports and Implications for Macroeconomics and Trade Research

[Symposium: Global Supply Chains]

By Robert C. Johnson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Due to the rise of global supply chains, gross exports do not accurately measure the amount of value added exchanged between countries. I highlight five facts about differences between gross and value-added exports. These differences are large and growing...

The Missing Food Problem: Trade, Agriculture, and International Productivity Differences

By Trevor Tombe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Agriculture in poor countries has low productivity, high employment, and negligible trade flows relative to other sectors. These facts motivate a multisector, open-economy view of international productivity differences. With a quantitative multicountry mo...

Projecting the Economic Impact of the Internet

By Robert E. Litan and Alice M. Rivlin

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Economic Impacts of Climate Change: Evidence from Agricultural Output and Random Fluctuations in Weather

By Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Review, March 2007

This paper measures the economic impact of climate change on US agricultural land by estimating the effect of random year-to-year variation in temperature and precipitation on agricultural profits. The preferred estimates indicate that climate change w...

A Black Swan in the Money Market

By John B. Taylor and John C. Williams

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

The recent financial crisis saw a dramatic and persistent jump in interest rate spreads between overnight federal funds and longer - term interbank loans. The Fed took several actions to reduce these spreads including the creation of the Term Auction F...