Price Changes in the Euro Area and the United States: Some Facts from Individual Consumer Price Data

By Emmanuel Dhyne, Luis J. Alvarez, Herve Le Bihan, Giovanni Veronese, Daniel Dias, Johannes Hoffmann, Nicole Jonker, Patrick Lunnemann, Fabio Rumler, and Jouko Vilmunen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

Prices of goods and services do not adjust immediately in response to changing demand and supply conditions. This paper characterizes the average frequency and size of price changes in the euro area and its member countries, investigates the determinants ...

Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability

By Timothy Besley and Andrea Prat

American Economic Review, June 2006

It has long been recognized that the media play an essential role in government accountability. Even in the absence of censorship, however, the government may influence news content by maintaining a "cozy" relationship with the media. This paper develo...

The Economics of HIV/AIDS in Low-Income Countries: The Case for Prevention

[Symposium: Disease and Development]

By David Canning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

There are two approaches to reducing the burden of sickness and death associated with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which leads to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS): treatment and prevention. Despite large international aid flows for HIV...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2006

Self-Enforcing Voting in International Organizations

By Giovanni Maggi and Massimo Morelli

American Economic Review, September 2006

Some international organizations are governed by unanimity rule, others by (simple or qualified) majority rules. Standard voting models, which assume that the decisions made by voting are perfectly enforceable, have a hard time explaining the observed ...

A Theory of Participation in Elections

By Timothy Feddersen and Alvaro Sandroni

American Economic Review, September 2006

We analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal. Ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so. Unlike previous duty-based models of parti...

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

Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?

By Susanto Basu, John G. Fernald, and Miles S. Kimball

American Economic Review, December 2006

Yes. We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for aggregation effects, varying utilization of capital and labor, nonconstant returns, and imperfect competition. On impact, when technology improves, input use and nonresidential...

Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments: Reply

By Dirk Engelmann and Martin Strobel

American Economic Review, December 2006

Phased-In Tax Cuts and Economic Activity

By Christopher L. House and Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, December 2006

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze and quantify the aggregate effects of the timing of tax rate changes enacted in 2001 (which called for successive rate reductions through 2006) and 2003 (which made immediate tax rate cuts sch...

Globalization and Emerging Markets: With or Without Crash?

By Philippe Martin and Hélène Rey

American Economic Review, December 2006

We analyze the effects of financial and trade globalization on the likelihood of financial crashes in emerging markets. While trade globalization always makes crashes less likely, financial globalization may make them more likely, especially when trade...

Inefficiency in Legislative Policymaking: A Dynamic Analysis

By Marco Battaglini and Stephen Coate

American Economic Review, March 2007

This paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining. The policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation....

Decision Making in Committees: Transparency, Reputation, and Voting Rules

By Gilat Levy

American Economic Review, March 2007

In this paper I analyze the effect of transparency on decision making in committees. I focus on committees whose members are motivated by career concerns. The main result is that when the decision-making process is secretive (when individual votes are ...

Bureaucrats or Politicians? Part I: A Single Policy Task

By Alberto Alesina and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, March 2007

This paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort, or if ...

Guilt in Games

By Pierpaolo Battigalli and Martin Dufwenberg

American Economic Review, May 2007

Decision–Making Procedures for Committees of Careerist Experts

By Gilat Levy

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Transparency of Politics and the Quality of Politicians

By Andrea Mattozzi and Antonio Merlo

American Economic Review, May 2007

On Quitting Rights in Mechanism Design

By Olivier Compte and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Review, May 2007

Market Maker Inventories and Stock Prices

By Terrence Hendershott and Mark S. Seasholes

American Economic Review, May 2007