An Interview with Alice Rivlin

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Federal Reserve Vice Chair Alice Rivlin speaks with Hali Edison

CSWEP Webinar: Disparities in Economics Seminars: Research and Responses

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CSWEP Webinar: Helping Faculty Help Students get into PhD Programs in Economics

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CSWEP Webinar Series on COVID-19

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Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

Inducing Cooperation through Weighted Voting and Veto Power

By Antonin Macé and Rafael Treibich

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study the design of voting rules for committees representing heterogeneous groups (countries, states, districts) when cooperation among groups is voluntary. While efficiency recommends weighting groups proportionally to their stakes, we show that accou...

Experimentation with Self-Serving Attribution Biases

By Nina Hestermann and Yves Le Yaouanq

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study an experimentation problem in a situation where the outcomes depend on the decision-maker's intrinsic ability and on an external variable. We analyze the mistakes made by individuals who hold inaccurate prior beliefs about their ability. Overconf...

Vertical Agreements and User Access

By Germain Gaudin and Alexander White

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

Platforms acting as sales channels for producers often charge users for access via a subscription fee or a markup on hardware. We compare two common forms of vertical pricing agreement that platforms use with sellers: per unit and proportional fees. In pa...

Utilitarian Aggregation with Heterogeneous Beliefs

By Antoine Billot and Xiangyu Qu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

The utilitarian aggregation rule requires social utility and beliefs to be a convex combination of individual utilities and beliefs, respectively. Since, in the case of belief heterogeneity, the standard Pareto condition is incompatible with such a separa...

Communities, Co-ops, and Clubs: Social Capital and Incentives in Large Collective Organizations

By Joshua A. Jacobs, Aaron M. Kolb, and Curtis R. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study a continuous-time organization design problem. Each member's output is an imperfect signal of his underlying effort, and each member's utility from remaining in the organization is endogenous to other members' efforts. Monetary transfers are assu...

Information Redundancy Neglect versus Overconfidence: A Social Learning Experiment

By Marco Angrisani, Antonio Guarino, Philippe Jehiel, and Toru Kitagawa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study social learning in a continuous action space experiment. Subjects, acting in sequence, state their beliefs about the value of a good after observing their predecessors' statements and a private signal. We compare the behavior in the laboratory wi...

Product Recalls and Firm Reputation

By Boyan Jovanovic

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

Product recall data and information on stock price reactions to recalls are used to estimate the value of reputation in a model in which product quality is not contractible. A recall is the result of a product defect that signals low effort. The recall tr...

A Bargaining-Based Model of Security Design

By Matan Tsur

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

This paper studies how security design affects project outcomes. Consider a firm that raises capital for multiple projects by offering investors a share of the revenues. The revenue of each project is determined ex post through bargaining with a buyer of ...

Policy Experimentation in Committees: A Case against Veto Rights under Redistributive Constraints

By Vincent Anesi and T. Renee Bowen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study optimal policy experimentation by a committee. We consider a dynamic bargaining game in which committee members choose either a risky reform or a safe alternative each period. When no redistribution is allowed, the unique equilibrium outcome is g...

Managerial Style and Attention

By Wouter Dessein and Tano Santos

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

Is firm behavior mainly driven by its environment or rather by the characteristics of its managers? We develop a cognitive theory of manager fixed effects, where the allocation of managerial attention determines firm behavior. We show that in complex envi...

Government Financing of R&D: A Mechanism Design Approach

By Saul Lach, Zvika Neeman, and Mark Schankerman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study how to design an optimal government loan program for risky R&D projects with positive externalities. With adverse selection, the optimal government contract involves a high interest rate but nearly zero cofinancing by the entrepreneur. This contr...

Black market for appointments

[Research Highlight]

July 23, 2021

Scalpers book free appointments online and then profit by selling them on secondary black markets. But there may be a simple solution.

How to Avoid Black Markets for Appointments with Online Booking Systems

By Rustamdjan Hakimov, C.-Philipp Heller, Dorothea Kübler, and Morimitsu Kurino

American Economic Review, July 2021

Allocating appointment slots is presented as a new application for market design. Online booking systems are commonly used by public authorities to allocate appointments for visa interviews, driver's licenses, passport renewals, etc. We document that bl...

Capital Structure

[Symposium: Changes in Corporate Structure]

By Stewart C. Myers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

Research on capital structure attempts to explain how corporations finance real investment, with particular emphasis on the proportions of debt vs. equity financing. There is no universal theory of the debt-equity choice, and no reason to expect one. But ...

Exclusivity and Tying in U.S. v. Microsoft: What We Know, and Don't Know

[Symposium: The Microsoft Case]

By Michael D. Whinston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

U.S. v. Microsoft involved the allegation that Microsoft violated the U.S.antitrust laws by engaging in a variety of practices aimed at excluding rivals and potential rivals, most notably the Netscape Corporation’s Navigator web browser. The government ...