Public Education Expenditures, Taxation, and Growth: Linking Data to Theory

By William F. Blankenau, Nicole B. Simpson, and Marc Tomljanovich

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Role of Labor Market Intermittency in Explaining Gender Wage Differentials

By Julie L. Hotchkiss and M. Melinda Pitts

American Economic Review, May 2007

Signaling Character in Electoral Competition

By Navin Kartik and R. Preston McAfee

American Economic Review, June 2007

We study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have "character" and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. Character is desira...

Harmonization and Side Payments in Political Cooperation

By Bård Harstad

American Economic Review, June 2007

For two districts or countries that try to internalize externalities, I analyze a bargaining game under private information. I derive conditions for when it is efficient with uniform policies across regions—with and without side payments— a...

Political Bias and War

By Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli

American Economic Review, September 2007

We examine how countries' incentives to go to war depend on the "political bias" of their pivotal decision makers. This bias is measured by a decision maker’s risk/ reward ratio from a war compared to that of the country at large. If there is no poli...

A Political-Economy Theory of Trade Agreements

By Giovanni Maggi and Andrés Rodríguez-Clare

American Economic Review, September 2007

We present a model where trade agreements are motivated by the desire of governments to commit vis-à-vis domestic lobbies, in addition to standard terms-of-trade externalities. The model predicts that trade liberalization is deeper when capital is...

Consensus Building: How to Persuade a Group

By Bernard Caillaud and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, December 2007

The paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of members in a group to approve the proposal. Adopting a mechanism design approach to communication, it emphasizes the need to distill information...

Optimal Gerrymandering: Sometimes Pack, but Never Crack

By John N. Friedman and Richard T. Holden

American Economic Review, March 2008

Standard intuitions for optimal gerrymandering involve concentrating one's extreme opponents in "unwinnable" districts ("packing") and spreading one's supporters evenly over "winnable" districts ("cracking"). These intuitions come from models with eith...

A Dynamic Theory of Public Spending, Taxation, and Debt

By Marco Battaglini and Stephen Coate

American Economic Review, March 2008

This paper presents a political economy theory of fiscal policy. Policy choices are made by a legislature that can raise revenues via an income tax and by borrowing. Revenues can be used to finance a public good, whose value is stochastic, and pork-bar...

Persistence of Power, Elites, and Institutions

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, March 2008

We construct a model to study the implications of changes in political institutions for economic institutions. A change in political institutions alters the distribution of de jure political power, but creates incentives for investments in de facto pol...

Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers' Voting on Women's Issues

By Ebonya L. Washington

American Economic Review, March 2008

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter i...

Bureaucrats or Politicians? Comment

By Fuhito Kojima

American Economic Review, March 2008

Alesina and Tabellini (2007) investigate the normative criteria for allocating policy tasks to bureaucrats versus politicians. While they establish criteria with respect to a number of parameters, they do not give a criterion with respect to the degree of...

Ten Little Treasures of Game Theory and Ten Intuitive Contradictions

By Jacob K. Goeree and Charles A. Holt

American Economic Review, December 2001

This paper reports laboratory data for games that are played only once. These games span the standard categories: static and dynamic games with complete and incomplete information. For each game, the treasure is a treatment in which behavior conforms nice...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

Industry Evidence on the Effects of Government Spending

By Christopher J. Nekarda and Valerie A. Ramey

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

This paper investigates the effects of government purchases at the industry level in order to shed light on the transmission mechanism for government spending on the aggregate economy. We create a new panel dataset that matches output and labor variables ...

Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives, and Evaluation

By Christopher A. Parsons, Johan Sulaeman, Michael C. Yates, and Daniel S. Hamermesh

American Economic Review, June 2011

Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers under...

The Inflation-Output Trade-Off with Downward Wage Rigidities

By Pierpaolo Benigno and Luca Antonio Ricci

American Economic Review, June 2011

The macroeconomic implications of downward nominal wage rigidities are analyzed via a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks. A closed-form solution for a long-run Phillips curve relates average output...

Education and Labor Market Discrimination

By Kevin Lang and Michael Manove

American Economic Review, June 2011

Using a model of statistical discrimination and educational sorting, we explain why blacks get more education than whites of similar cognitive ability, and we explore how the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), wages, and education are related. The...

Face Value

By Catherine C. Eckel and Ragan Petrie

American Economic Review, June 2011

People pay attention to the appearance of others, and personal characteristics can affect many types of decisions. We ask, is there informational value in a face in a situation where trust and reciprocity can increase earnings? We use a laboratory trust g...

Term Premia and Inflation Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from an International Panel Dataset

By Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Review, June 2011

This paper provides cross-country empirical evidence on term premia. I construct a panel of zero-coupon nominal government bond yields spanning ten industrialized countries and nearly two decades. I hence compute forward rates and use two different method...