Research on the Economics Profession

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

In this article, I survey some recent contributions to research on the profession, both to bring nonspecialists up to date on what is being done and to inform specialists of other researchers who are doing similar work. The economics profession is interes...

On the Demise of the Long Run

By Roy B. Helfgott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

John Maynard Keynes observed that, "In the long run we are all dead," but in terms of economic analysis, the long run also may be dead. The culprit is new technology that is wiping out many of the distinctions between the long and short run. As pointed ou...

Implications of the U.S. Current Account Deficit

By David H. Howard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

In 1988, the United States recorded a deficit of about $135 billion on the current account of its balance of payments with the rest of the world. This paper presents an analytical framework for thinking about the current account deficit, explores causes o...

Work and Welfare: Lessons on Employment Programs

[Symposium: Welfare and Workfare]

By Judith M. Gueron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

The nation's social welfare policy reflects an ongoing effort to balance sometimes competing objectives—alleviating poverty and promoting self-sufficiency—in a manner consistent with underlying public values about the primacy of the family and...

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments

By J. Michelle Brock, Andreas Lange, and Erkut Y. Ozbay

American Economic Review, February 2013

We study if and how social preferences extend to risky environments. We provide experimental evidence from different versions of dictator games with risky outcomes and establish that preferences that are exclusively based on ex post or on ex ante compa...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Married to Intolerance: Attitudes toward Intermarriage in Germany, 1900-2006

By Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review, May 2013

We analyze under what conditions intermarriage can be used as an indicator of tolerance, and whether such tolerant attitudes persisted in Germany during the twentieth century. We find strong evidence for the persistence of tolerant attitudes towards inter...

The Persistence of Inferior Cultural-Institutional Conventions

By Marianna Belloc and Samuel Bowles

American Economic Review, May 2013

Our theory of cultural-institutional persistence and innovation is based on uncoordinated updating of individual social norms and contracts, so that both culture and institutions co-evolve. We explain why Pareto-dominated cultural-institutional configurat...

A Theory of Strategic Voting in Runoff Elections

By Laurent Bouton

American Economic Review, June 2013

This paper analyzes the properties of runoff electoral systems when voters are strategic. A model of three-candidate runoff elections is presented, and two new features are included: the risk of upset victory in the second round is endogenous, and many...

Bounded-Rationality Models: Tasks to Become Intellectually Competitive

By Ronald M. Harstad and Reinhard Selten

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Research in experimental economics has cogently challenged the fundamental precept of neoclassical economics that economic agents optimize. The last two decades have seen elaboration of boundedly rational models that try to move away from the optimizati...

Boundedly Rational versus Optimization-Based Models of Strategic Thinking and Learning in Games

By Vincent P. Crawford

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Harstad and Selten's article in this forum performs a valuable service by highlighting the dominance of optimization-based models over boundedly rational models in modern microeconomics, and questioning whether optimization-based models are a better wa...

Strategic Tournaments

By Ayala Arad and Ariel Rubinstein

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2013

A strategic (round-robin) tournament is a simultaneous n-player game built on top of a symmetric two-player game G. Each player chooses one action in G and is matched to play G against all other players. The winner of the tournament is the player who a...

Bank Bailouts, International Linkages, and Cooperation

By Friederike Niepmann and Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

Financial institutions are increasingly linked internationally. As a result, financial crises and government intervention have stronger effects beyond borders. We provide a model of international contagion allowing for bank bailouts. While a social pla...

Social Preferences under Risk: Equality of Opportunity versus Equality of Outcome

By Kota Saito

American Economic Review, December 2013

This paper axiomatizes a utility function for social preferences under risk. In the model, a single parameter captures a preference for equality of opportunity (i.e., equality of exante expected payoffs) relative to equality of outcome (i.e., equality o...

Strategic Interaction and Networks

By Yann Bramoullé, Rachel Kranton, and Martin D'Amours

American Economic Review, March 2014

Geography and social links shape economic interactions. In industries, schools, and markets, the entire network determines outcomes. This paper analyzes a large class of games and obtains a striking result. Equilibria depend on a single network measure:...

Information Acquisition in a War of Attrition

By Kyungmin Kim and Frances Zhiyun Xu Lee

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

We consider a war of attrition where the players can learn about a state that determines their payoffs at stochastic deadline. We study how the incentives to acquire information depend on the (un)verifiability of information and its implications for ef...

Vendettas

By Friedel Bolle, Jonathan H. W. Tan, and Daniel John Zizzo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

Vendettas occur in many real-world settings where rivals compete for a prize, e.g., winning a competitive promotion or retaining a job, by engaging in aggressive, retaliatory behavior. We present a benchmark experiment where two players have an initial ...

Language, Meaning, and Games: A Model of Communication, Coordination, and Evolution: Comment

By Yuval Heller

American Economic Review, June 2014

Demichelis & Weibull (AER 2008) show that adding lexicographic lying costs to coordination games with cheap talk yields a sharp prediction: only the efficient outcome is evolutionarily stable. I show that this result is caused by the discontinuity of p...

Vertical Bargaining and Countervailing Power

By Alberto Iozzi and Tommaso Valletti

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2014

We study a set of bilateral Nash bargaining problems between an upstream input supplier and several differentiated but competing retailers. If one bilateral bargain fails, the supplier can sell to the other retailers. We show that, in a disagreement, the ...

Resisting Moral Wiggle Room: How Robust Is Reciprocal Behavior?

By Joël J. van der Weele, Julija Kulisa, Michael Kosfeld, and Guido Friebel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2014

We provide the second mover in a trust game and a moonlighting game with an excuse for not reciprocating. While this type of manipulation has been shown to strongly reduce giving in the dictator game, we find that the availability of the excuse has no eff...