Ownership Consolidation and Product Characteristics: A Study of the US Daily Newspaper Market

By Ying Fan

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper develops a structural model of newspaper markets to analyze the effects of ownership consolidation, taking into account not only firms' price adjustments but also the adjustments in newspaper characteristics. A new dataset on newspaper price...

Quantifying Quality Growth

By Mark Bils and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, September 2001

Using U.S. Consumer Expenditure Surveys, we estimate "quality Engel curves" for 66 durable goods based on the extent richer households pay more for each good. The same data show that the average price paid rises faster from 1980 to 1996 for goods with ste...

Public Monopoly and Economic Efficiency: Evidence from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's Entry Decisions

By Katja Seim and Joel Waldfogel

American Economic Review, April 2013

We estimate a spatial model of liquor demand to analyze the impact of government-controlled retailing on entry patterns. In the absence of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, the state would have roughly 2.5 times the current number of stores, highe...

Integration of Trade and Disintegration of Production in the Global Economy

[Symposium: Globalization in Perspective]

By Robert C. Feenstra

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The last few decades have seen a spectacular integration of the global economy through trade. The rising integration of world markets has brought with it a disintegration of the production process, however, in which manufacturing or services activities do...

Child Gender and Parental Investments in India: Are Boys and Girls Treated Differently?

By Silvia Helena Barcellos, Leandro S. Carvalho, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

Previous research has not always found that boys and girls are treated differently in rural India. However estimates of the effect of gender on parental investments could be biased if girls end up in larger families due to son-biased stopping rules. Us...

Information and Employee Evaluation: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Public Schools

By Jonah E. Rockoff, Douglas O. Staiger, Thomas J. Kane, and Eric S. Taylor

American Economic Review, December 2012

We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with impe...

Federal Crop Insurance and the Disincentive to Adapt to Extreme Heat

By Francis Annan and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, May 2015

Despite significant progress in average yields, the sensitivity of corn and soybean yields to extreme heat has remained relatively constant over time. We combine county-level corn and soybeans yields in the United States from 1989-2013 with the fraction o...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Is Probability Theory Relevant for Uncertainty? A Post Keynesian Perspective

By Paul Davidson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Mainstream perspectives involving uncertainty presume that expectations are based on either a statistical analysis of past data, with market signals providing information about objective probabilities, or on subjective perceptions of these probabilities f...

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments: On Morals and Why They Matter to a Liberal Society of Free People and Free Markets

[Symposium: The Moral Sentiments]

By Jerry Evensky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

This essay describes Smith's analysis of ethics in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: the interaction of our nature and our nurturing that makes common civic ethics possible and the dynamic interaction of individuals and extant societal constructions that ca...

Growing Like China

By Zheng Song, Kjetil Storesletten, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, February 2011

We construct a growth model consistent with China's economic transition: high output growth, sustained returns on capital, reallocation within the manufacturing sector, and a large trade surplus. Entrepreneurial firms use more productive technologies, but...

Job Selection and Wages over the Business Cycle

By Marcus Hagedorn and Iourii Manovskii

American Economic Review, April 2013

We consider a model with on-the-job search where current wages depend only on current aggregate labor market conditions and idiosyncratic match-specific productivities. We show theoretically that the model replicates the findings in Bils (1985) and Beau...

China's Macroeconomic Performance and Management during Transition

[Symposium: China]

By Shahid Yusuf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

Since reforms started in 1978, China has combined rapid growth with moderate price stability. This paper analyzes China's macroeconomic performance over the past fifteen years with special attention to factors responsible both for the pace of economic exp...

The Research Productivity of New PhDs in Economics: The Surprisingly High Non-success of the Successful

[Symposium: Academic Production]

By John P. Conley and Ali Sina Önder

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

We study the research productivity of new graduates from North American PhD programs in economics from 1986 to 2000. We find that research productivity drops off very quickly with class rank at all departments, and that the rank of the graduate department...

What's the Matter with Tie-Breaking? Improving Efficiency in School Choice

By Aytek Erdil and Haluk Ergin

American Economic Review, June 2008

In several school choice districts in the United States, the student proposing deferred acceptance algorithm is applied after indifferences in priority orders are broken in some exogenous way. Although such a tie-breaking procedure preserves stability,...

Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit

By Francesco Drago, Tommaso Nannicini, and Francesco Sobbrio

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

This paper uses an original dataset covering the presence of local news in medium-large Italian cities in the period 1993–2010 to evaluate the effects of newspaper entry and exit on electoral participation, political selection, and government effici...

Racial Discrimination in the Labor Market: Theory and Empirics

By Kevin Lang and Jee-Yeon K. Lehmann

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

We review theories of race discrimination in the labor market. Taste-based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread, but no existing ...

Risk Shocks

By Lawrence J. Christiano, Roberto Motto, and Massimo Rostagno

American Economic Review, January 2014

We augment a standard monetary dynamic general equilibrium model to include a Bernanke-Gertler-Gilchrist financial accelerator mechanism. We fit the model to US data, allowing the volatility of cross-sectional idiosyncratic uncertainty to fluctuate ove...

Individual Preferences for Giving

By Raymond Fisman, Shachar Kariv, and Daniel Markovits

American Economic Review, December 2007

We utilize graphical representations of Dictator Games which generate rich individual- level data. Our baseline experiment employs budget sets over feasible payoff- pairs. We test these data for consistency with utility maximization, and we recover th...

Mandatory versus Discretionary Spending: The Status Quo Effect

By T. Renee Bowen, Ying Chen, and Hülya Eraslan

American Economic Review, October 2014

Do mandatory spending programs such as Medicare improve efficiency? We analyze a model with two parties allocating a fixed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an infinite horizon. We compare two institutions that differ in wheth...