Are Health Insurance Markets Competitive?

By Leemore S. Dafny

American Economic Review, September 2010

To gauge the competitiveness of the group health insurance industry, I investigate whether health insurers charge higher premiums, ceteris paribus, to more profitable firms. Such "direct price discrimination" is feasible only in imperfectly competitive se...

General Index for Volume XLV

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2007

What Determines Giving to Hurricane Katrina Victims? Experimental Evidence on Racial Group Loyalty

By Christina M. Fong and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We investigate the role of racial group loyalty on generosity in a broadly representative sample of the US adult population. We use an audiovisual presentation to manipulate beliefs about the race, income, and worthiness of Hurricane Katrina victims. R...

What Makes Them Click: Empirical Analysis of Consumer Demand for Search Advertising

By Przemyslaw Jeziorski and Ilya Segal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We study users' responses to sponsored-search advertising using consumer-level data from Microsoft Live. We document that users click ads in a nonsequential order and that the click through rates depend on the identity of competing ads. We estimate a dyna...

The Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration: Evidence from Several Italian Collective Pardons

By Alessandro Barbarino and Giovanni Mastrobuoni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

We estimate the "incapacitation effect" on crime using variation in Italian prison population driven by eight collective pardons passed between 1962 and 1990. The prison releases are sudden (within one day), very large (up to 35 percent of the entire p...

The Revenue Demands of Public Employee Pension Promises

By Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

We calculate increases in contributions required to achieve full funding of state and local pension systems in the United States over 30 years. Without policy changes, contributions would have to increase by 2.5 times, reaching 14.1 percent of the tota...

Information and Industry Dynamics

By Emin M. Dinlersoz and Mehmet Yorukoglu

American Economic Review, April 2012

This paper develops a model of industry dynamics where firms compete to acquire customers over time by disseminating information about themselves in the presence of random shocks to their efficiency. The properties of the model's stationary equilibrium ar...

International Income Inequality: Measuring PPP Bias by Estimating Engel Curves for Food

By Ingvild Almås

American Economic Review, April 2012

Purchasing power-adjusted incomes applied in cross-country comparisons are measured with bias. This paper estimates the purchasing power parity (PPP) bias in Penn World Table incomes and provides corrected incomes. The bias is substantial and systematic: ...

Prospects in the Academic Labor Market for Economists

By Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

This paper discussed what the academic labor market for economists is likely to look like in the years ahead. After tracing out trends in PhD production of new economists, including the increasing share of new PhDs who are foreign residents, it presents n...

Learning about an Infrequent Event: Evidence from Flood Insurance Take-Up in the United States

By Justin Gallagher

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

I examine the learning process that economic agents use to update their expectation of an uncertain and infrequently observed event. I use a new nation-wide panel dataset of large regional floods and flood insurance policies to show that insurance take-up...

Euro-Area Quantitative Easing and Portfolio Rebalancing

By Ralph S. J. Koijen, François Koulischer, Benoît Nguyen, and Motohiro Yogo

American Economic Review, May 2017

We use new and comprehensive data on the security holdings of euro-area investors to document facts about the ongoing quantitative easing program. The holdings of purchase-eligible government bonds have strong home bias not only for banks but also for ins...

A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty

By Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir

American Economic Review, May 2004

Market Structure, Reputation, and the Value of Quality Certification

By Daniel W. Elfenbein, Raymond Fisman, and Brian McManus

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

Quality certification programs help consumers identify high-quality products or sellers in markets with information asymmetries. Using data from eBay UK's online marketplace, we study how certification's impact on demand varies with market- and seller- le...

Inefficiencies in Networked Markets

By Matthew Elliott

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

In many markets, relationship specific investments are necessary for trade. These formed relationships constitute a networked market in which not all buyers can trade with all sellers. We show that networked markets can be decomposed to identify how alter...

Net Neutrality, Business Models, and Internet Interconnection

By Jay Pil Choi, Doh-Shin Jeon, and Byung-Cheol Kim

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We analyze the effect of net neutrality regulation in a two-sided market framework when content is heterogeneous in its sensitivity to delivery quality. We characterize the equilibrium in a neutral network constrained to offer the same quality vis-à-vis ...

The Preference for Belief Consonance

[Symposium: Motivated Beliefs]

By Russell Golman, George Loewenstein, Karl Ove Moene, and Luca Zarri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

We consider the determinants and consequences of a source of utility that has received limited attention from economists: people's desire for the beliefs of other people to align with their own. We relate this 'preference for belief consonance' to a varie...

Specifying a Structural Matching Game of Trading Networks with Transferable Utility

By Jeremy T. Fox

American Economic Review, May 2017

Structural estimation of matching games with transferable utility, including matching games of trading networks and many-to-many matching, is increasingly popular in empirical work. I explore several modeling decisions that need to be made when specifying...

The Case for Antitrust Enforcement

[Symposium: Activist Antitrust?]

By Jonathan B. Baker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

This paper provides evidence of the necessity and success of antitrust enforcement. It begins with examples of socially beneficial antitrust challenges by the federal antitrust agencies to price-fixing and other forms of collusion; to mergers that appear ...

Pushing on a String: US Monetary Policy Is Less Powerful in Recessions

By Silvana Tenreyro and Gregory Thwaites

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2016

We investigate how the response of the US economy to monetary policy shocks depends on the state of the business cycle. The effects of monetary policy are less powerful in recessions, especially for durables expenditure and business investment. The asymme...

The Aggregate Impact of Household Saving and Borrowing Constraints: Designing a Field Experiment in Uganda

By Joseph P. Kaboski, Molly Lipscomb, and Virgiliu Midrigan

American Economic Review, May 2014

We develop a model of households with multiple needs (smoothing shocks, financing investment) and constraints (limited credit, self-control issues) in order to examine the nature of household's financing constraints in a developing country, and the impact...