Habit Formation in Consumer Preferences: Evidence from Panel Data

By Karen E. Dynan

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper tests for the presence of habit formation using household data. A simple model of habit formation implies a condition relating the strength of habits to the evolution of consumption over time. When the condition is estimated with food consumpti...

Why Have College Completion Rates Declined? An Analysis of Changing Student Preparation and Collegiate Resources

By John Bound, Michael F. Lovenheim, and Sarah Turner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Rising college enrollment over the last quarter century has not been met with a proportional increase in college completion. Comparing the high school classes of 1972 and 1992, we show declines in college completion rates have been most pronounced for men...

Fixing Market Failures or Fixing Elections? Agricultural Credit in India

By Shawn Cole

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

This paper integrates theories of political budget cycles with theories of tactical electoral redistribution to test for political capture in a novel way. Studying banks in India, I find that government-owned bank lending tracks the electoral cycle, wi...

The Economics of Governance

By Oliver E. Williamson

American Economic Review, May 2005

Macroeconomic Modeling for Monetary Policy Evaluation

[Symposium: Monetary Policy]

By Jordi Galí and Mark Gertler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

We describe some of the main features of the recent vintage of macroeconomic models used for monetary policy evaluation. We point to some of the key differences with respect to the earlier generation of macro models and highlight the insights for policy t...

No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012

By Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger

American Economic Review, February 2017

How have house prices evolved over the long run? This paper presents annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. We show that real house prices stayed constant from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, but rose strongly and with subs...

Antidumping Investigations and the Pass-Through of Antidumping Duties and Exchange Rates: Reply

By Bruce A. Blonigen and Stephen E. Haynes

American Economic Review, June 2010

This reply responds to a comment that correctly identifies an invalid assumption in our original article that antidumping (AD) duties are subtracted from the U.S. price when calculating AD duties in administrative reviews. While this point invalidates our...

Searching and Learning by Trial and Error

By Steven Callander

American Economic Review, October 2011

I study a dynamic model of trial-and-error search in which agents do not have complete knowledge of how choices are mapped into outcomes. Agents learn about the mapping by observing the choices of earlier agents and the outcomes that are realized. The key...

Public Goods, Social Pressure, and the Choice between Privacy and Publicity

By Andrew F. Daughety and Jennifer F. Reinganum

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

We model privacy as an agent's choice of action being unobservable to others. An agent derives utility from his action, the aggregate of agents' actions, and other agents' perceptions of his type. If his action is unobservable, he takes his full-informati...

The Geography of Trade in Online Transactions: Evidence from eBay and MercadoLibre

By Ali Hortaçsu, F. Asís Martínez-Jerez, and Jason Douglas

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2009

We analyze geographic patterns of trade between individuals using transactions data from eBay and MercadoLibre, two large online auction sites. We find that distance continues to be an important deterrent to trade between geographically separated buyer...

Systems Competition and Network Effects

[Symposium: Network Externalities]

By Michael L. Katz and Carl Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

This paper discusses firm behavior, market performance, and the public and private institutions that arise in systems markets, i.e., markets where consumers use compatible components together to generate benefits. In such markets, which include communicat...

Are Information Disclosures Effective? Evidence from the Credit Card Market

By Enrique Seira, Alan Elizondo, and Eduardo Laguna-Müggenburg

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on government agendas, even though there is little evidence of its effectiveness. We implement a randomized control trial in the credit card market for a large populati...

The Effects of High Stakes High School Achievement Awards: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Joshua Angrist and Victor Lavy

American Economic Review, September 2009

The Israeli matriculation certificate is a prerequisite for most postsecondary schooling. In a randomized trial, we attempted to increase certification rates among low-achievers with cash incentives. The experiment used a school-based randomization des...

Why Was the Arab World Poised for Revolution? Schooling, Economic Opportunities, and the Arab Spring

By Filipe R. Campante and Davin Chor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

What underlying long-term conditions set the stage for the Arab Spring? In recent decades, the Arab region has been characterized by an expansion in schooling coupled with weak labor market conditions. This pattern is especially pronounced in those countr...

Requiem for the Representative Consumer? Aggregate Implications of Microeconomic Consumption Behavior

By Christopher D. Carroll

American Economic Review, May 2000

Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm

By Eric Van den Steen

American Economic Review, March 2010

This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm's centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give the manager, as an equilibrium outcome, interpersonal authority over employees (in a world with open disagreement). The paper thus pr...

Fluctuations in Uncertainty

By Nicholas Bloom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Uncertainty is an amorphous concept. It reflects uncertainty in the minds of consumers, managers, and policymakers about possible futures. It is also a broad concept, including uncertainty over the path of macro phenomena like GDP growth, micro phenomena ...

Costs of Reducing Global Carbon Emissions

[Symposium]

By John P. Weyant

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

Projecting the costs of reducing carbon emissions is extremely important, and exceedingly difficult. Such projections are an integral component of cost-benefit analyses of alternative policies in response to climate change. This paper first discusses the ...

Nonmarket Institutions for Credit and Risk Sharing in Low-Income Countries

[Symposium: Consumption Smoothing in Developing Countries]

By Timothy Besley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

The design credit and risk institutions in low-income countries provides one of the most exciting testing grounds for theories of contracting with imperfect information and limited enforcement. This paper reviews some of the recent literature, with a spec...

Information Aggregation in Standing and Ad Hoc Committees

By S. Nageeb Ali, Jacob K. Goeree, Navin Kartik, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Review, May 2008