The Failure Mechanics of Dealer Banks

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Darrell Duffie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

During the recent financial crisis, major dealer banks -- that is, banks that intermediate markets for securities and derivatives -- suffered from new forms of bank runs. The most vivid examples are the 2008 failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. D...

Liquidity: A New Monetarist Perspective

By Ricardo Lagos, Guillaume Rocheteau, and Randall Wright

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

This essay surveys the new monetarist approach to liquidity. Work in this literature strives for empirical and policy relevance, plus rigorous foundations. Questions include: What is liquidity? Is money essential in achieving desirable outcomes? Which obj...

The Economics of Fair Trade

By Raluca Dragusanu, Daniele Giovannucci, and Nathan Nunn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

Fair Trade is a labeling initiative aimed at improving the lives of the poor in developing countries by offering better terms to producers and helping them to organize. Although Fair Trade-certified products still comprise a small share of the market&mdas...

Breakthroughs, Deadlines, and Self-Reported Progress: Contracting for Multistage Projects

By Brett Green and Curtis R. Taylor

American Economic Review, December 2016

We study the optimal incentive scheme for a multistage project in which the agent privately observes intermediate progress. The optimal contract involves a soft deadline wherein the principal guarantees funding up to a certain date--if the agent reports p...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Review

By Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg

American Economic Review, May 2016

War and Stature: Growing Up during the Nigerian Civil War

By Richard Akresh, Sonia Bhalotra, Marinella Leone, and Una Okonkwo Osili

American Economic Review, May 2012

The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated south-eastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades l...

Optimal Gerrymandering: Sometimes Pack, but Never Crack

By John N. Friedman and Richard T. Holden

American Economic Review, March 2008

Standard intuitions for optimal gerrymandering involve concentrating one's extreme opponents in "unwinnable" districts ("packing") and spreading one's supporters evenly over "winnable" districts ("cracking"). These intuitions come from models with eith...

Can Social Information Affect What Job You Choose and Keep?

By Lucas C. Coffman, Clayton R. Featherstone, and Judd B. Kessler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

We show that the provision of social information influences a high-stakes decision and this influence persists over time. In a field experiment involving thousands of admits to Teach For America, those told about the previous year's matriculation rate are...

Determinants of Callbacks to Job Applications: An Audit Study

By Henry S. Farber, Dan Silverman, and Till von Wachter

American Economic Review, May 2016

We summarize findings from an audit study investigating how unemployment duration, age, and holding a low-level "interim" job affect the likelihood that experienced college-educated females applying for administrative support jobs receive a callback from ...

Implications of the Labor Market for Graduate Education in Economics

By Anne O. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

The Siegfried-Stock findings represent the first solid data available since COGEE collected its data in the late 1980s. This paper reviews the COGEE findings in light of the new evidence. On the whole, the news is good: new Ph.D.s awarded are up, economic...

Competition and Price Variation When Consumers Are Loss Averse

By Paul Heidhues and Botond Kőszegi

American Economic Review, September 2008

We modify the Salop (1979) model of price competition with differentiated products by assuming that consumers are loss averse relative to a reference point given by their recent expectations about the purchase. Consumers' sensitivity to losses in money...

The Macroeconomic Costs and Benefits of the EMU and Other Monetary Unions: An Overview of Recent Research

By Roel Beetsma and Massimo Giuliodori

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

This article provides an overview of recent research into the macroeconomic costs and benefits of monetary unification. We are primarily interested in Europe's monetary union. Given that unification entails the loss of a policy instrument, its potential ...

The Characterological Imperative: On Heckman, Humphries, and Kautz's The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life

By Robert J. Sampson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2016

James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz make a powerful case for noncognitive skills--or what they conceptualize as character--as an explanation of educational achievement and other important outcomes in life. They do so while exposing the my...

New Keynesian Models: Not Yet Useful for Policy Analysis

By V. V. Chari, Patrick J. Kehoe, and Ellen R. McGrattan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

Macroeconomists have largely converged on method, model design, reduced-form shocks, and principles of policy advice. Our main disagreements today are about implementing the methodology. Some think New Keynesian models are ready to be used for quarter-...

Consumption Inequality and Partial Insurance

By Richard Blundell, Luigi Pistaferri, and Ian Preston

American Economic Review, December 2008

This paper examines the link between income and consumption inequality. We create panel data on consumption for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics using an imputation procedure based on food demand estimates from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We doc...

Unbiased Value Estimates for Environmental Goods: A Cheap Talk Design for the Contingent Valuation Method

By Ronald G. Cummings and Laura O. Taylor

American Economic Review, June 1999

An Alternative to Signaling: Directed Search and Substitution

By Matthew Levy and Balázs Szentes

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

This paper analyzes a labor market, where: workers can acquire an observable skill at no cost, firms differ in unobserved productivity, workers' skill and firms' productivity are substitutes, and firms' search is directed. The main result is that, if the ...

The International Diversification Puzzle When Goods Prices Are Sticky: It's Really about Exchange-Rate Hedging, Not Equity Portfolios

By Charles Engel and Akito Matsumoto

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

This paper develops a two-country monetary DSGE model in which households choose a portfolio of home and foreign equities, and a forward position in foreign exchange. Some nominal goods prices are sticky. Trade in these assets achieves the same allocat...

Teacher Quality Policy When Supply Matters

By Jesse Rothstein

American Economic Review, January 2015

Teacher contracts that condition pay and retention on demonstrated performance can improve selection into and out of teaching. I study alternative contracts in a simulated teacher labor market that incorporates dynamic self-selection and Bayesian learning...

A Boundedly Rational Decision Algorithm

By Xavier Gabaix and David I. Laibson

American Economic Review, May 2000