How Auctions Work for Wine and Art

[Symposium: Auctions]

By Orley Ashenfelter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

At the first wine auction I ever attended, I saw the repeal of the law of one price. This empirical surprise led me to begin collecting data on wine auctions, to interview auctioneers, and even to buy a little wine. In the meantime I have also had the opp...

Socialist Economics: The Disequilibrium School and the Shortage Economy

By Jozef M. van Brabant

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

This article focuses on the debate between Richard Portes and Janos Kornai as the respective exponents of two interpretations of economic behavior in centrally planned economies: the disequilibrium school, and the theory of the shortage economy. My object...

Retrospectives: Ceteris Paribus

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

In Webster's Dictionary is an example of how to use "ceteris paribus": [S]taple-growing states are, ceteris paribus, more favorable to slave labor than manufacturing states." I suspect it would take a minor treatise to elucidate fully the ceteris paribus ...

Policy Watch: Tax Credits for Low-Income Workers with Children

By C. Eugene Steuerle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The most important tax credits available to low-income households with children are the earned income tax credit (EITC), the child tax credit, and the child and dependent care tax credit (hereafter, child-care credit). Only the EITC and the child-care cre...

Correspondence: Human Resources in South Korea

By Semoon Chang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

The Limits of Trade Policy Reform in Developing Countries

[Symposium: Trade Liberalization and Development]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

Trade reform is now raising some new issues. This paper deals with three sets of questions: First, how can trade reform be sustained? Can governments convince business, labor, or consumers that trade reform will be lasting, so as to forestall possible adv...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

Evidence on the Incidence of Wage Posting, Wage Bargaining, and On-the-Job Search

By Robert E. Hall and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others face a posted wage as a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. Both modes of wage determination have generated large bodies of research. We surveyed a representative sample of US wor...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

Who Matters in Coordination Problems?

By József Sákovics and Jakub Steiner

American Economic Review, December 2012

Agents face a coordination problem akin to the adoption of a network technology. A principal announces investment subsidies that, at minimal cost, attain a given likelihood of successful coordination. Optimal subsidies target agents who impose high ext...

Social Learning with Coarse Inference

By Antonio Guarino and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

We study social learning by boundedly rational agents. Agents take a decision in sequence, after observing their predecessors and a private signal. They are unable to make perfect inferences from their predecessors' decisions: they only understand the r...

Public Transfers and Domestic Violence: The Roles of Private Information and Spousal Control

By Gustavo J. Bobonis, Melissa González-Brenes, and Roberto Castro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

We study whether transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women decrease the incidence of spousal abuse. We examine the impact of the Mexican Oportunidades program on spousal abuse rates and threats of violence using data from a specialized sur...

Pandering to Persuade

By Yeon-Koo Che, Wouter Dessein, and Navin Kartik

American Economic Review, February 2013

An agent advises a principal on selecting one of multiple projects or an outside option. The agent is privately informed about the projects' benefits and shares the principal's preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option. ...

School Admissions Reform in Chicago and England: Comparing Mechanisms by Their Vulnerability to Manipulation

By Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, February 2013

In Fall 2009, Chicago authorities abandoned a school assignment mechanism midstream, citing concerns about its vulnerability to manipulation. Nonetheless, they asked thousands of applicants to re-rank schools in a new mechanism that is also manipulable...

Selection on Moral Hazard in Health Insurance

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Stephen P. Ryan, Paul Schrimpf, and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Review, February 2013

We use employee-level panel data from a single firm to explore the possibility that individuals may select insurance coverage in part based on their anticipated behavioral ("moral hazard") response to insurance, a phenomenon we label "selection on mora...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2013

The Case against Patents

[Symposium: Patents]

By Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correl...

Structural Models of Nonequilibrium Strategic Thinking: Theory, Evidence, and Applications

By Vincent P. Crawford, Miguel A. Costa-Gomes, and Nagore Iriberri

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Most applications of game theory assume equilibrium, justified by presuming either that learning will have converged to one, or that equilibrium approximates people's strategic thinking even when a learning justification is implausible. Yet several recent...