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

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

By Stephen Morris, Hyun Song Shin, and Hui Tong

American Economic Review, March 2006

The Effects of Rate Regulation on Demand for Supplemental Health Insurance

By M. Kate Bundorf and Kosali I. Simon

American Economic Review, May 2006

Postsecondary Education and Increasing Wage Inequality

By Thomas Lemieux

American Economic Review, May 2006

Shades of Discrimination: Skin Tone and Wages

By Arthur H. Goldsmith, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity Jr

American Economic Review, May 2006

Crime and Punishment: And Skin Hue Too?

By Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong and Gregory N. Price

American Economic Review, May 2006

Skin-Tone Effects among African Americans: Perceptions and Reality

By Joni Hersch

American Economic Review, May 2006

Wages and Employment in a Random Social Network with Arbitrary Degree Distribution

By Yannis M. Ioannides and Adriaan R. Soetevent

American Economic Review, May 2006

Factor Reallocation in Eastern Germany after Reunification

By Michael C. Burda

American Economic Review, May 2006

Sudden Stops and Phoenix Miracles in Emerging Markets

By Guillermo A. Calvo, Alejandro Izquierdo, and Ernesto Talvi

American Economic Review, May 2006

A Change Would Do You Good .... An Experimental Study on How to Overcome Coordination Failure in Organizations

By Jordi Brandts and David J. Cooper

American Economic Review, June 2006

We study how financial incentives can be used to overcome a history of coordination failure using controlled laboratory experiments. Subjects' payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels. In an initial phase, the benefits of coordination are l...

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...

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...

Initial Labor Market Conditions and Long-Term Outcomes for Economists

[Symposium: The Market for Economists]

By Paul Oyer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

Each year, graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk. Given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia, one mig...

An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis

By Jahn K. Hakes and Raymond D. Sauer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

Michael Lewis's book, Moneyball, describes how an innovative manager working for the Oakland Athletics successfully exploited an inefficiency in baseball's labor market over a prolonged period of time. We evaluate Lewis's claims by applying standar...

Multiple Dimensions of Private Information: Evidence from the Long-Term Care Insurance Market

By Amy Finkelstein and Kathleen McGarry

American Economic Review, September 2006

We demonstrate the existence of multiple dimensions of private information in the long-term care insurance market. Two types of people purchase insurance: individuals with private information that they are high risk and individuals with private informa...

A Model of Forum Shopping

By Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, September 2006

Owners of intellectual property or mere sponsors of an idea (e.g., authors, security issuers, sponsors of standards) resort to more or less independent certifiers to persuade potential users (buyers or adopters) of the worth of their property or idea. W...

$1,000 Cash Back: The Pass-Through of Auto Manufacturer Promotions

By Meghan Busse, Jorge Silva-Risso, and Florian Zettelmeyer

American Economic Review, September 2006

Automobile manufacturers frequently use promotions involving cash incentives. While payments are nominally directed to either customers or dealers, the ultimate beneficiary of the promotion depends on the outcome of price negotiation. We use program ev...