Human Capital Formation, Life Expectancy, and the Process of Development

By Matteo Cervellati and Uwe Sunde

American Economic Review, December 2005

We provide a unified theory of the transition in income, life expectancy, education, and population size from a nondeveloped environment to sustained growth. Individuals optimally trade off the time cost of education with its lifetime returns. Initially, ...

National Treatment in the GATT

By Henrik Horn

American Economic Review, March 2006

The National Treatment (NT) clause is the first-line defense in the GATT (and in most other trade agreements) against opportunistic exploitation of the inevitable incompleteness of the agreement. This paper examines the role of NT as it applies to interna...

Social Value of Public Information: Comment: Morris and Shin (2002) Is Actually Pro-Transparency, Not Con

By Lars E. O. Svensson

American Economic Review, March 2006

The Evolution of a Global Climate Change Agreement

By William A. Pizer

American Economic Review, May 2006

Valuing Consumer Products by the Time Spent Using Them: An Application to the Internet

By Austan Goolsbee and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Regulatory Record of the Greenspan Fed

By Charles W. Calomiris

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Road to Price Stability

By Athanasios Orphanides

American Economic Review, May 2006

Individual versus Parental Consent in Marriage: Implications for Intra-Household Resource Allocation and Growth

By Lena Edlund and Nils-Petter Lagerlöf

American Economic Review, May 2006

Family Structure, Institutions, and Growth: The Origins and Implications of Western Corporations

By Avner Greif

American Economic Review, May 2006

Executive Turnover and Firm Performance in China

By Takao Kato and Cheryl Long

American Economic Review, May 2006

An Efficient Dynamic Auction for Heterogeneous Commodities

By Lawrence M. Ausubel

American Economic Review, June 2006

This article proposes a new dynamic design for auctioning multiple heterogeneous commodities. An auctioneer wishes to allocate K types of commodities among n bidders. The auctioneer announces a vector of current prices, bidders report quantities demand...

Paying Not to Go to the Gym

By Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier

American Economic Review, June 2006

How do consumers choose from a menu of contracts? We analyze a novel dataset from three U.S. health clubs with information on both the contractual choice and the day-to-day attendance decisions of 7,752 members over three years. The observed consumer b...

Pareto-Improving Social Security Reform when Financial Markets are Incomplete!?

By Dirk Krueger and Felix Kubler

American Economic Review, June 2006

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with stochastic production and incomplete markets to assess whether the introduction of an unfunded social security system leads to a Pareto improvement. When returns to capital and wages are imperfec...

General versus Specific Skills in Labor Markets with Search Frictions and Firing Costs

By Etienne Wasmer

American Economic Review, June 2006

Human capital investments are not independent of the aggregate state of labor markets: frictions and slackness of the labor market raise the returns to specific human capital investments relative to general investments. We build a macroeconomic model with...

The Determinants of Mortality

[Symposium: Disease and Development]

By David Cutler, Angus Deaton, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The pleasures of life are worth nothing if one is not alive to experience them. Through the twentieth century in the United States and other high-income countries, growth in real incomes was accompanied by a historically unprecedented decline in mortality...

Retrospectives: The Coining of "Privatization" and Germany's National Socialist Party

By Germá Bel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The concept of privatization attracted much attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher's privatization policies were implemented in the United Kingdom. My goal here is not to comment on the merits of privatization as a policy, but r...

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity

By Jérôme Adda and Francesca Cornaglia

American Economic Review, September 2006

This paper analyses the compensatory behavior of smokers. Exploiting data on cotinine concentration—a metabolite of nicotine—measured in a large population of smokers over time, we show that smokers compensate for tax hikes by extracting more nicotin...

Stock Prices, News, and Economic Fluctuations

By Paul Beaudry and Franck Portier

American Economic Review, September 2006

We show that the joint behavior of stock prices and TFP favors a view of business cycles driven largely by a shock that does not affect productivity in the short run – and therefore does not look like a standard technology shock – but affects productivi...

Caps on Political Lobbying: Comment

By Todd R. Kaplan and David Wettstein

American Economic Review, September 2006

The London Congestion Charge

By Jonathan Leape

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

By the 1990s, the average speed of trips across London was below that at the beginning of the twentieth century -- before the car was introduced -- and by the end of that decade, public concern over levels of traffic congestion was high. In early 2003, Lo...