The Politics of Compromise

By Alessandro Bonatti and Heikki Rantakari

American Economic Review, February 2016

An organization must select among competing projects that differ in their payoff consequences for its members. Each agent chooses a project and exerts effort affecting its completion time. When one or more projects are complete, the agents select which on...

A Structural Perspective on the Experimentalist School

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Michael P. Keane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

What has always bothered me about the "experimentalist" school is the false sense of certainty it conveys. My view, like Leamer's, is that there is no way to escape the role of assumptions in statistical work, so our conclusions will always be contingent....

Chipping Away at the Glass Ceiling: Gender Spillovers in Corporate Leadership

By David A. Matsa and Amalia R. Miller

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper examines the role of women helping women in corporate America. Using a merged panel of directors and executives for large US corporations between 1997 and 2009, we find a positive association between the female share of the board of directors i...

Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Policy in OECD Countries

By Timothy J. Hatton

American Economic Review, May 2016

Refugees and asylum seekers are only a small proportion of the 60 million forcibly displaced persons. But those seeking asylum in the developed world have received much of the attention as western governments have struggled to develop a policy response. A...

Corporate Governance and Merger Activity in the United States: Making Sense of the 1980s and 1990s

[Symposium: Changes in Corporate Structure]

By Bengt Holmstrom and Steven N. Kaplan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

This paper describes and considers explanations for changes in corporate governance and merger activity in the United States since 1980. Corporate governance in the 1980s was dominated by intense merger activity distinguished by the prevalence of leverage...

State "Currencies" and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Clarifying Some Confusions

By Ronald W. Michener and Robert E. Wright

American Economic Review, June 2005

Farley W. Grubb's recent papers on the early U.S. monetary system would be important contributions to the common currency area literature were not most of their historical assertions questionable and their key assumption—that the medium of exchange can ...

Using Taxes to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions Rates of New Passenger Vehicles: Evidence from France, Germany, and Sweden

By Thomas Klier and Joshua Linn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

France, Germany, and Sweden link taxes to passenger vehicles' carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rates. Based on new vehicle registration data from 2005 to 2010, we find that CO2 taxes reduce registrations. The effect is larger in France than in either German...

Contractual and Organizational Structure with Reciprocal Agents

By Florian Englmaier and Stephen Leider

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2012

We solve for the optimal contract when agents are reciprocal, demonstrating that generous compensation can substitute for performance-based pay. Our results suggest several factors that make firms more likely to use reciprocal incentives. Reciprocity is ...

The Myth of Immigrant Women as Secondary Workers: Evidence from Canada

By Alícia Adserà and Ana M. Ferrer

American Economic Review, May 2014

We use the confidential files of the Canadian Census 1991–2006, combined with information from O*NET on the skill requirements of jobs, to show that the labor market patterns of female immigrants do not fit the profile of secondary workers, but rath...

Early Life Health and Cognitive Function in Old Age

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2009

Risk Preferences Are Not Time Preferences: Balancing on a Budget Line: Comment

By Thomas Epper and Helga Fehr-Duda

American Economic Review, July 2015

In a recent experimental study of intertemporal risky decision making, Andreoni and Sprenger (2012) find that subjects exhibit a preference for intertemporal diversification, which is inconsistent with discounted expected utility theory. It was claimed th...

Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance

By Rainer Böhme, Nicolas Christin, Benjamin Edelman, and Tyler Moore

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

Bitcoin is an online communication protocol that facilitates the use of a virtual currency, including electronic payments. Bitcoin's rules were designed by engineers with no apparent influence from lawyers or regulators. Bitcoin is built on a transaction ...

Jonathan Levin: 2011 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Liran Einav and Steve Tadelis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

Jonathan Levin, the 2011 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, has established himself as a leader in the fields of industrial organization and microeconomic theory. Jon has made important contributions in many areas: th...

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Comment

By Jason Abrevaya and Laura Puzzello

American Economic Review, June 2012

This paper re-examines Adda and Cornaglia's (2006) evidence on the compensatory behavior of smokers who, in face of higher taxes, are found to reduce their consumption of cigarettes while maintaining their cotinine—a biomarker for nicotine—lev...

The Effect of Classmate Characteristics on Post-secondary Outcomes: Evidence from the Add Health

By Robert Bifulco, Jason M. Fletcher, and Stephen L. Ross

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

This paper uses a within-school/across-cohort design to present new evidence of the effects of high school classmate characteristics on a wide range of post-secondary outcomes. We find that increases in the percent of classmates with college-educated moth...

Modest, Secure, and Informed: Successful Development in Conflict Zones

By Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Erin Troland

American Economic Review, May 2013

Most interpretations of prevalent counterinsurgency theory imply that increasing government services reduces rebel violence. Empirically, however, development programs and economic activity sometimes increase violence. Using new panel data on development ...

Consumption Smoothing and Frequency of Benefit Payments of Cash Transfer Programs

By Emma Aguila, Arie Kapteyn, and Francisco Perez-Arce

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze two noncontributory Mexican pension programs for the elderly. Both paid similar amounts, but one paid monthly while the other paid every two months. The Life Cycle Hypothesis suggests frequency of benefits payments should not affect consumption...

Bureaucrats or Politicians? Part I: A Single Policy Task

By Alberto Alesina and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, March 2007

This paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort, or if ...

Auctions, Actions, and the Failure of Information Aggregation

By Alp E. Atakan and Mehmet Ekmekci

American Economic Review, July 2014

We study a uniform-price auction where k identical common-value objects are allocated amongst z > k bidders who have imperfect signals about the state of the world. The common valuation is determined jointly by the state and an action that is chosen after...

Can Multistage Production Explain the Home Bias in Trade?

By Kei-Mu Yi

American Economic Review, March 2010

A large empirical literature finds that there is too little international trade and too much intranational trade to be rationalized by observed international trade costs, such as tariffs and transport costs. This paper investigates whether a model in w...