Employer Stock and 401(k) Plans

By James M. Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2003

Fundamentals, Panics, and Bank Distress During the Depression

By Charles W. Calomiris and Joseph R. Mason

American Economic Review, December 2003

We assemble bank-level and other data for Fed member banks to model determinants of bank failure. Fundamentals explain bank failure risk well. The first two Friedman-Schwartz crises are not associated with positive unexplained residual failure risk, or in...

Kin Groups and Reciprocity: A Model of Credit Transactions in Ghana

By Eliana La Ferrara

American Economic Review, December 2003

This paper studies kinship band networks as capital market institutions. Membership in a community where individuals are dynastically linked has two effects on informal credit. First, the nonanonymity of the dynastic link allows to sanction the defaulters...

Crime, Inequality, and Unemployment

By Kenneth Burdett, Ricardo Lagos, and Randall Wright

American Economic Review, December 2003

Socioeconomic Status and Child Health: Why Is the Relationship Stronger for Older Children?

By Janet Currie and Mark Stabile

American Economic Review, December 2003

Understanding Trend and Cycle in Asset Values: Reevaluating the Wealth Effect on Consumption

By Martin Lettau and Sydney C. Ludvigson

American Economic Review, March 2004

Transparency of Information and Coordination in Economies with Investment Complementarities

By George-Marios Angeletos and Alessandro Pavan

American Economic Review, May 2004

Medical Compliance and Income-Health Gradients

By Anne Case, Ingrid Le Roux, and Alicia Menendez

American Economic Review, May 2004

Irreversible Decisions and Record-Setting News Principles

By Svetlana Boyarchenko

American Economic Review, June 2004

In the now-classical real options theory, the price of an underlying asset is modeled as a geometric Brownian motion, and optimal exercise strategies are described by simple explicit formulas. This paper extends the classical theory to allow any geometric...

Money Does Matter! Evidence from Increasing Real Income and Life Satisfaction in East Germany Following Reunification

By Paul Frijters, John P. Haisken-DeNew, and Michael A. Shields

American Economic Review, June 2004

Sunk Investments Lead to Unpredictable Prices

By George J. Mailath, Andrew Postlewaite, and Larry Samuelson

American Economic Review, September 2004

We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertain...

Running to Keep in the Same Place: Consumer Choice as a Game of Status

By Ed Hopkins and Tatiana Kornienko

American Economic Review, September 2004

If individuals care about their status, defined as their rank in the distribution of consumption of one "positional" good, then the consumer's problem is strategic as her utility depends on the consumption choices of others. In the symmetric Nash equilibr...

A Group Rule-Utilitarian Approach to Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence

By Stephen Coate and Michael Conlin

American Economic Review, December 2004

This paper explores a group rule–utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout, inspired by the theoretical work of John C. Harsanyi (1980) and Timothy J. Feddersen and Alvaro Sandroni (2002). It develops a model based on this approach and studies...

The Consequences of the Growth of Health Insurance Premiums

By Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra

American Economic Review, May 2005

The Evolution of High Incomes in Northern America: Lessons from Canadian Evidence

By Emmanuel Saez and Michael R. Veall

American Economic Review, June 2005

Fairness and Redistribution

By Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos

American Economic Review, September 2005

Different beliefs about the fairness of social competition and what determines income inequality influence the redistributive policy chosen in a society. But the composition of income in equilibrium depends on tax policies. We show how the interaction bet...

Wealth Concentration in a Developing Economy: Paris and France, 1807-1994

By Thomas Piketty, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal

American Economic Review, March 2006

Using large samples of estate tax returns, we construct new series on wealth concentration in Paris and France from 1807 to 1994. Inequality increased until 1914 because industrial and financial estates grew dramatically. Then, adverse shocks, rather than...

Inequality, Lobbying, and Resource Allocation

By Joan Esteban and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, March 2006

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They ...

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...