Monopsony trends

[Page]

How much employer market power does the US manufacturing sector have?

AEA Announcements: Plans for 2023 ASSA Meeting in New Orleans

[News]

July 20, 2022

View announcement from July 21, 2022.

Committee Spotlight: Q&A with Sam Allgood, Chair of the Task Force on Outreach to High School and Undergraduate Students in Economics

[News]

July 05, 2022

The Chair of the Task Force on Outreach, Sam Allgood, answers some questions about the task force's mission and activities.

Why Have College Completion Rates Increased?

By Jeffrey T. Denning, Eric R. Eide, Kevin J. Mumford, Richard W. Patterson, and Merrill Warnick

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We document that college completion rates have increased since the 1990s, after declining in the 1970s and 1980s. We find that most of the increase in graduation rates can be explained by grade inflation and that other factors, such as changing student ch...

Grade inflation and graduation

[Research Highlight]

July 21, 2022

Jeffrey Denning discusses how lower grading standards have led to higher college completion rates.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

Strategic Teaching and Learning in Games

By Burkhard C. Schipper

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We show there is no uncoupled learning heuristic leading to Nash equilibrium in all finite games that a player has an incentive to adopt, that would be evolutionary stable, or that could "learn itself." Rather, a player has an incentive to strategically t...

Term Limits and Bargaining Power in Electoral Competition

By Germán Gieczewski

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

I study a dynamic model of electoral competition between candidates with heterogeneous valence. When the candidates' and voters' policy preferences differ, the winner extracts rents, limited only by the voters' threat of electing the weaker candidate. Thi...

Waiting to Choose: The Role of Deliberation in Intertemporal Choice

By Alex Imas, Michael A. Kuhn, and Vera Mironova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We study the impact of deliberation on intertemporal choices. Using multiple experiments, including a field study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we show that the introduction of waiting periods—a policy that temporally separates information ab...

Acquisition, Aggregation, and Sharing of Information in Sequential-Move Aggregative Games

By Eray Cumbul

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We study quadratic payoff common-value sequential-move aggregative games with signaling. Applications include Stackelberg quantity-setting, public good contribution, common resource, gas emission, and manufacturer-retailer games. Whereas efficient aggrega...

Production Clustering and Offshoring

By Vladimir Tyazhelnikov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

I introduce a model of international production that allows the production chain to be of any length or number of sourcing countries and in which the production process does not have to be perfectly sequential. The presence of trade costs in this model ma...

Dynamic Competition and Arbitrage in Electricity Markets: The Role of Financial Players

By Ignacia Mercadal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

I study the effects of financial players who trade alongside physical buyers and sellers in electricity markets. Using detailed firm-level data, I examine physical and financial firms' responses to regulation that exogenously increased financial trading. ...

Platform Governance

By Tat-How Teh

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

Platforms that intermediate trades—such as Amazon, Airbnb, and eBay—play a regulatory role in deciding how to govern the marketplaces they create. We propose a framework to analyze a platform's nonprice governance design and its incentive to act in a ...

A Theory of Crime and Vigilance

By Jorge Vásquez

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

This paper develops a theory of crime in which potential victims elect their vigilance levels. When vigilance expenses are greater than expected property losses, an increase in penalties raises crime, namely, a criminal Laffer curve emerges. This curve is...

Fairness through the Lens of Cooperative Game Theory: An Experimental Approach

By Geoffroy de Clippel and Kareen Rozen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We experimentally investigate how impartial observers allocate money to agents whose complementarity and substitutability determine the surplus that each group can achieve. Analyzing the data through the lens of axioms and solutions from cooperative game ...

Belief Elicitation When More than Money Matters: Controlling for "Control"

By Jean-Pierre Benoît, Juan Dubra, and Giorgia Romagnoli

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

Elicitation mechanisms typically presume only money enters utility functions. However, nonmonetary objectives are confounders. In particular, psychologists argue people favor bets where ability is involved over equivalent random bets—a preference for co...

Searching Forever After

By Yair Antler and Benjamin Bachi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We study a model of two-sided search in which agents' strategic reasoning is coarse. In equilibrium, the most desirable agents behave as if they were fully rational, while for all other agents, coarse reasoning results in overoptimism with regard to their...

Competitive Information Disclosure to an Auctioneer

By Stefan Terstiege and Cédric Wasser

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We analyze how voluntary disclosure of information by bidders affects the outcome of optimally designed auctions. In a single-object auction environment, we assume that before the revenue-maximizing auctioneer designs the auction, bidders noncooperatively...

Political Competition with Endogenous Party Formation and Citizen Activists

By Emanuel Hansen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

This paper studies the effects of endogenous party formation on political platforms. It develops a model in which parties allow like-minded citizens to, first, share the cost of running in a public election and, second, coordinate on a policy platform. Th...

Trust and Promises over Time

By Florian Ederer and Frédéric Schneider

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

Using a large-scale hybrid laboratory and online trust experiment with and without preplay communication, we investigate how the passage of time affects trust. Communication (predominantly through promises) raises cooperation, trust, and trustworthiness b...