Managing Growth to Achieve Efficient Coordination in Large Groups

By Roberto A. Weber

American Economic Review, March 2006

Previous experiments using the minimum-effort coordination game reveal a striking regularity—large groups never coordinate efficiently. Given the frequency with which large real-world groups, such as firms, face similarly difficult coordination problems...

Estimating Average and Local Average Treatment Effects of Education when Compulsory Schooling Laws Really Matter

By Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Review, March 2006

The change to the minimum school-leaving age in the United Kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14-year-olds in the mid-twentieth century to stay in school for one more year. The magnitude...

The Long-Term Impact of Military Service on Health: Evidence from World War II and Korean War Veterans

By Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschênes

American Economic Review, March 2006

During the World War II and Korean War era, the U.S. military freely distributed cigarettes to overseas personnel and provided low-cost tobacco products on domestic military bases. In fact, even today the military continues to sell subsidized tobacco prod...

Why Beauty Matters

By Markus M. Mobius and Tanya S. Rosenblat

American Economic Review, March 2006

We decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market where "employers" determine wages of "workers" who perform a maze-solving task. This task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness. We find a sizable be...

Benefit-Cost in a Benevolent Society

By Theodore C. Bergstrom

American Economic Review, March 2006

How should benefit-cost analysis account for the value that benevolent individuals place on others' enjoyment of public goods? When adding up the benefits to be compared with costs, should we sum the private valuations, the altruistic valuations, or somet...

Politically Connected Firms

By Mara Faccio

American Economic Review, March 2006

Examination of firms in 47 countries shows a widespread overlap of controlling shareholders and top officers who are connected with national parliaments or governments, particularly in countries with higher levels of corruption, with barriers to foreign i...

The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family

By Claudia Goldin

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Greenspan Era: Discretion, Rather than Rules

By Benjamin M. Friedman

American Economic Review, May 2006

Modernizing China's Growth Paradigm

By Eswar S. Prasad and Raghuram G. Rajan

American Economic Review, May 2006

Requiring a Math Skills Unit: Results of a Randomized Experiment

By Susan Pozo and Charles A. Stull

American Economic Review, May 2006

Report of the Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives

By Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Review, May 2006

Schumpeter Redux: A Review of Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales's Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists

By Richard Sylla

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2006

Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists is an ambitious probe into capitalism's past, present, and future. Whereas Joseph A. Schumpeter viewed capitalism as doomed because it was losing its political and social supports, Rajan and Zingales see i...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2006

On the Simple Economics of Advertising, Marketing, and Product Design

By Justin P. Johnson and David P. Myatt

American Economic Review, June 2006

We propose a framework for analyzing transformations of demand. Such transformations frequently stem from changes in the dispersion of consumers' valuations, which lead to rotations of the demand curve. In many settings, profits are a U-shaped function...

Caps on Political Lobbying: Comment

By Todd R. Kaplan and David Wettstein

American Economic Review, September 2006

Caps on Political Lobbying: Reply

By Yeon-Koo Che and Ian L. Gale

American Economic Review, September 2006

The Real Effects of European Monetary Union

[Symposium: The Euro]

By Philip R. Lane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

We explore the impact of European monetary union on the economies of the member countries. Inflation differentials across the euro area have been persistent, such that cumulative real exchange rate movements across the euro area have been quite substantia...

Interview with Robert A. Mundell

By Howard R. Vane and Chris Mulhearn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Robert A. Mundell has been Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York City, New York, since 1974 and University Professor since 2001. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science "for his analysis of monetary and fis...

The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap

By Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor's degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the na...

A Dual-Self Model of Impulse Control

By Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine

American Economic Review, December 2006

We propose that a simple “dual-self” model gives a unified explanation for several empirical regularities, including the apparent time inconsistency that has motivated models of quasi-hyperbolic discounting and Rabin’s paradox of risk aversion in the...