Regulatory Competition and the Market for Corporate Law

By Ofer Eldar and Lorenzo Magnolfi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2020

This article develops an empirical model of firms' choice of corporate laws under inertia. Delaware dominates the incorporation market, though recently Nevada, a state whose laws are highly protective of managers, has acquired a sizable market share. Usin...

Incomplete Information Games with Ambiguity Averse Players

By Eran Hanany, Peter Klibanoff, and Sujoy Mukerji

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2020

We study incomplete information games with ambiguity averse players. Our focus is on equilibrium concepts satisfying sequential optimality—each player's strategy is optimal at each information set given opponents' strategies. We show sequential optimali...

Job Insecurity

By Aditya Kuvalekar and Elliot Lipnowski

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2020

We examine the relationship between job security and productivity in a fixed wage worker-firm relationship facing match quality uncertainty. The worker's action affects both learning and current productivity. The firm, seeing worker behavior and outcomes,...

The Economics of Crowdfunding

By Jen-Wen Chang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2020

An entrepreneur finances her project via crowdfunding. She chooses a funding mechanism (fixed or flexible), a price, and a funding goal. Under fixed funding, money is refunded if the goal is not met; under flexible funding, there is no refund. Backers obs...

Revealed Preference Implications of Backward Induction and Subgame Perfection

By Pablo Schenone

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2020

Consider a decision-maker (DM) who must select an alternative from a set of mutually exclusive alternatives but must take this decision sequentially. If the DM's choice correspondence over subsets of alternatives satisfies the weak axiom of revealed prefe...

Keeping the lights on

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Should electricity be a right?

A Model of Secular Stagnation: Theory and Quantitative Evaluation

By Gauti B. Eggertsson, Neil R. Mehrotra, and Jacob A. Robbins

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2019

This paper formalizes and quantifies the secular stagnation hypothesis, defined as a persistently low or negative natural rate of interest leading to a chronically binding zero lower bound (ZLB). Output-inflation dynamics and policy prescriptions are fund...

Discrimination via Symmetric Auctions

By Rahul Deb and Mallesh M. Pai

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

Discrimination (for instance, along the lines of race or gender) is often prohibited in auctions. This is legally enforced by preventing the seller from explicitly biasing the rules in favor of bidders from certain groups (for example, by subsidizing thei...

Paul Milgrom, Distinguished Fellow 2020

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Whitney Newey, Distinguished Fellow 2020

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Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2020

A Model of Complex Contracts

By Alexander M. Jakobsen

American Economic Review, May 2020

I study a mechanism design problem involving a principal and a single, boundedly rational agent. The agent transitions among belief states by combining current beliefs with up to K pieces of information at a time. By expressing a mechanism as a complex co...

Heterogeneous Beliefs and School Choice Mechanisms

By Adam J. Kapor, Christopher A. Neilson, and Seth D. Zimmerman

American Economic Review, May 2020

This paper studies how welfare outcomes in centralized school choice depend on the assignment mechanism when participants are not fully informed. Using a survey of school choice participants in a strategic setting, we show that beliefs about admissions ch...

Interest Rates under Falling Stars

By Michael D. Bauer and Glenn D. Rudebusch

American Economic Review, May 2020

Macro-finance theory implies that trend inflation and the equilibrium real interest rate are fundamental determinants of the yield curve. However, empirical models of the term structure of interest rates generally assume that these fundamentals are consta...

Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers

By Sascha O. Becker, Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtländer, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Review, May 2020

We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled ( primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, f...

Learning under Diverse World Views: Model-Based Inference

By George J. Mailath and Larry Samuelson

American Economic Review, May 2020

People reason about uncertainty with deliberately incomplete models. How do people hampered by different, incomplete views of the world learn from each other? We introduce a model of "model-based inference." Model-based reasoners partition an otherwise ho...

Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Review, May 2020

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We st...

Do medical bankruptcy laws affect health insurance rates?

[Research Highlight]

February 09, 2016

Some people are using bankruptcy laws as a crude form of health insurance

Melissa Dell, Clark Medalist 2020

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"An ambassador of the economics profession"

[Research Highlight]

March 31, 2020

Gregory Mankiw reflects on three decades as a textbook author.