Lying for Strategic Advantage: Rational and Boundedly Rational Misrepresentation of Intentions

By Vincent P. Crawford

American Economic Review, March 2003

Starting from an example of the Allies' decision to feint at Calais and attack Normandy on D-Day, this paper models misrepresentation of intentions to competitors or enemies. Allowing for the possibility of bounded strategic rationality and rational playe...

Information and Quality When Motivation Is Intrinsic: Evidence from Surgeon Report Cards

By Jonathan T. Kolstad

American Economic Review, December 2013

If profit maximization is the objective of a firm, new information about quality should affect firm behavior only through its effects on market demand. I consider an alternate model in which suppliers are motivated by a desire to perform well in additi...

Financial Markets and Firm Dynamics

By Thomas F. Cooley and Vincenzo Quadrini

American Economic Review, December 2001

Recent studies have shown that the dynamics of firms (growth, job reallocation, and exit) are negatively correlated with the initial size of the firm and its age. In this paper we analyze whether financial factors, in addition to technological differences...

Matching and Sorting in Online Dating

By Gunter J. Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu, and Dan Ariely

American Economic Review, March 2010

Using data on user attributes and interactions from an online dating site, we estimate mate preferences, and use the Gale-Shapley algorithm to predict stable matches. The predicted matches are similar to the actual matches achieved by the dating site, ...

Delinking Land Rights from Land Use: Certification and Migration in Mexico

By Alain de Janvry, Kyle Emerick, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Elisabeth Sadoulet

American Economic Review, October 2015

In many developing countries property rights over rural land are maintained through continuous personal use instead of by land titles. We show that removing the link between land use and land rights through the issuance of ownership certificates can resul...

Systemic Risk and Stability in Financial Networks

By Daron Acemoglu, Asuman Ozdaglar, and Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi

American Economic Review, February 2015

This paper argues that the extent of financial contagion exhibits a form of phase transition: as long as the magnitude of negative shocks affecting financial institutions are sufficiently small, a more densely connected financial network (corresponding...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Is the Phillips Curve Alive and Well after All? Inflation Expectations and the Missing Disinflation

By Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2015

We evaluate explanations for the absence of disinflation during the Great Recession and find popular explanations to be insufficient. We propose a new explanation for this puzzle within the context of a standard Phillips curve. If firms' inflation expecta...

Is the WTO Passé?

By Kyle Bagwell, Chad P. Bown, and Robert W. Staiger

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade li...

Mafia and Public Spending: Evidence on the Fiscal Multiplier from a Quasi-experiment

By Antonio Acconcia, Giancarlo Corsetti, and Saverio Simonelli

American Economic Review, July 2014

A law issued to combat political corruption and Mafia infiltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output mul...

The Numerical Reliability of Econometric Software

By B. D. McCullough and H. D. Vinod

Journal of Economic Literature, June 1999

Numerous examples show that some econometric software packages contain serious flaws, and that users cannot safely assume that their software is accurate. A brief survey of the fundamentals of computer arithmetic discusses the sources of numerical error a...

Effects of Deregulation and Consolidation of the Broadcast Television Industry

By Jessica Calfee Stahl

American Economic Review, August 2016

This paper exploits deregulation in the 1990s to estimate viewership and revenue effects of consolidation in broadcast television, then finds cost effects that explain the ownership structure given viewership and revenue effects. Results suggest that cons...

US Food Aid and Civil Conflict

By Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in U.S. wheat production and cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any U.S. food ai...

Legal Realism for Economists

By Matthew C. Stephenson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Economists have made great progress in understanding the incentives and behavior of actors who operate outside of traditional economic markets, including voters, legislators, and bureaucrats. The incentives and behavior of judges, however, remain largely ...

Distributional Effects of Globalization in Developing Countries

By Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg and Nina Pavcnik

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2007

The authors discuss recent empirical research on how globalization has affected income inequality in developing countries. They begin with a discussion of conceptual issues regarding the measurement of globalization and inequality. Next, they present e...

Changing Household Financial Opportunities and Economic Security

[Symposium: Household Risks]

By Karen E. Dynan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

Households have experienced an expansion of financial opportunities over the past several decades. Expanded financial opportunities, such as the democratization of credit and new lending approaches, can yield benefits in terms of household economic securi...

Long-Term Consequences of Vietnam-Era Conscription: New Estimates Using Social Security Data

By Joshua D. Angrist, Stacey H. Chen, and Jae Song

American Economic Review, May 2011

We use the draft lottery to construct instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the impact of Vietnam-era military service on veterans' Social Security (SSA) earnings through 2007. We also use SSA data to construct IV estimates for employment (as measured ...

Estimating Average and Local Average Treatment Effects of Education when Compulsory Schooling Laws Really Matter

By Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Review, March 2006

The change to the minimum school-leaving age in the United Kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14-year-olds in the mid-twentieth century to stay in school for one more year. The magnitude...

Globalization and Growth

By Gene M. Grossman and Elhanan Helpman

American Economic Review, May 2015

How does globalization affect economic growth? We discuss mechanisms that link international integration to the incentives for knowledge accumulation and the efficacy of that process. First, integration facilitates the flow of knowledge across national bo...

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment

By David Neumark and William Wascher

American Economic Review, December 2000