How Antitrust Enforcement Can Spur Innovation: Bell Labs and the 1956 Consent Decree

By Martin Watzinger, Thomas A. Fackler, Markus Nagler, and Monika Schnitzer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Is compulsory licensing an effective antitrust remedy to increase innovation? To answer this question, we analyze the 1956 consent decree that settled an antitrust lawsuit against Bell, a vertically integrated monopolist charged with foreclosing the telec...

Who Benefits from Information Disclosure? The Case of Retail Gasoline

By Fernando Luco

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

How does online price disclosure affect competition when both consumers and firms can use the disclosed information? This paper addresses this question exploiting the sequential implementation of an online price-disclosure policy in the Chilean retail gas...

Rebecca Blank, Distinguished Fellow 2021

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Robert Townsend, Distinguished Fellow 2021

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Anne Case, Distinguished Fellow 2021

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Alan Auerbach, Distinguished Fellow 2021

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Isaiah Andrews, Clark Medalist 2021

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JOE Surveys

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European Conference on the Diffusion of Genomic Medicine: Health Economics & Policy

[News]

April 20, 2021

The conference will be held online from May 26-28, 2021.

Welfare reform and the next generation

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What impact does cutting disability benefits have on the children of recipients?

Money and matriculation

[News]

April 14, 2021

How do household decisions about sending kids to college change after winning the lottery?

AEA Member Announcements: Annual Elections and other Announcements

[News]

April 23, 2021

View member announcements from April 27, 2021.

Estimating Platform Market Power in Two-Sided Markets with an Application to Magazine Advertising

By Minjae Song

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

In two-sided markets, two groups of agents interact through platforms. Because agents' decision to join a platform is affected by the presence of agents on the other side, their interactions create indirect network externalities and make platforms' strate...

Crisis Management in Canada: Analyzing Default Risk and Liquidity Demand during Financial Stress

By Jason Allen, Ali Hortaçsu, and Jakub Kastl

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Using detailed information from the Canadian interbank payments system and liquidity-providing facilities, we find that despite sustained increases in market-rate spreads, the increase in banks' willingness to pay for liquidity during the 2008–2009 fina...

Competition and Price Transparency in the Market for Lemons: Experimental Evidence

By Olivier Bochet and Simon Siegenthaler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

In markets with asymmetric information, where equilibria are often inefficient, bargaining can help promote welfare. We design an experiment to examine the impact of competition and price transparency in such settings. Consistent with the theoretical pred...

Fair Utilitarianism

By Marc Fleurbaey and Stéphane Zuber

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Utilitarianism plays a central role in economics, but there is a gap between theory, where utilitarianism is dominant, and applications, where monetary criteria are often used. For applications, a key difficulty is to define how utilities should be measur...

Revealing Naïveté and Sophistication from Procrastination and Preproperation

By David J. Freeman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

This paper proposes a novel way of distinguishing whether a person is naive or sophisticated about her own dynamic inconsistency using only her task-completion behavior. It shows that adding an unused extra opportunity to complete a task can lead a naïve...

Exit, Tweets, and Loyalty

By Joshua S. Gans, Avi Goldfarb, and Mara Lederman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty highlights the role of "voice" when individuals confront an unexpected deterioration in quality. Yet, voice has received little attention. To motivate our empirical analysis, we develop a simple model of voice...

Fees, Reputation, and Information Production in the Credit Rating Industry

By Jacopo Bizzotto and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We compare a credit rating agency's incentives to acquire costly information when it is only paid for giving favorable ratings to the corresponding incentives when the agency is paid up-front, i.e., irrespective of the ratings assigned. We show that, in t...

The Competitive Effects of Transmission Infrastructure in the Indian Electricity Market

By Nicholas Ryan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

The integration of markets may improve efficiency by lowering costs or reducing local market power. India, seeking to reduce electricity shortages, set up a new power market, in which transmission constraints sharply limit trade between regions. During co...