Economic Foundations of the Current Regulatory Reform Efforts

By W. Kip Viscusi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

Regulatory reform proposals before Congress would potentially increase the role of economics in regulatory policymaking. These reforms seek to override existing legislative mandates, which usually prohibit economic trade-offs and have often led to ineffic...

Bonus Payments versus Efficiency Wages in the Repeated Principal-Agent Model with Subjective Evaluations

By Lucas Maestri

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

We study an infinitely repeated principal-agent model with subjective evaluations. We compare the surplus in efficiency-wage equilibria and in bonus-payments equilibria. The agent receives a constant wage and is motivated by the threat of dismissal in ef...

The National Assessment of Educational Progress in Economics: Findings for General Economics

By William B. Walstad and Stephen Buckles

American Economic Review, May 2008

To Review or Not to Review? Limited Strategic Thinking at the Movie Box Office

By Alexander L. Brown, Colin F. Camerer, and Dan Lovallo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2012

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. These cold openings provide a natural setting to apply laboratory-developed models of limited strategic thinking to the field. In a set of 1,303 widely released movies, cold op...

Cliometrics and the Nobel

By Claudia Goldin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

In October 1993, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to Robert William Fogel and Douglass Cecil North 'for having renewed research in economic history.' The Academy noted that 'they were pioneers in the branch of eco...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Review, May 2010

Enterprise Reform in Chinese Industry

[Symposium: China]

By Gary H. Jefferson and Thomas G. Rawski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

This paper begins by using a structure-conduct-performance perspective to show that partial reform improved the operation of China's state industries during the 1980s. The authors review the achievements of industries outside the state sector, emphasizing...

Gender Differences in the Labor Market: Impact of IRCA

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Cynthia Bansak, and Steven Raphael

American Economic Review, May 2007

Oil and Conflict: What Does the Cross Country Evidence Really Show?

By Anca M. Cotet and Kevin K. Tsui

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

This paper re-examines the effect of oil wealth on political violence. Using a unique historical panel dataset of oil discoveries, we show that simply controlling for country fixed effects removes the statistical association between the value of oil re...

Optimal Provision of Multiple Excludable Public Goods

By Hanming Fang and Peter Norman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2010

This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods. For a class of problems with symmetric goods and binary valuations, we show that the optimal mechanism involves bundling if a regularity condition, akin to a hazard r...

The Effects of Tax Shocks on Output: Not So Large, but Not Small Either

By Roberto Perotti

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

I argue that, on theoretical grounds, the discretionary component of taxation should be allowed to have different effects than the automatic response of tax revenues to macroeconomic variables. Based on a novel dataset, I show two results. First, response...

Incentives and Student Learning: A Natural Experiment with Economics Problem Sets

By Wayne A. Grove and Tim Wasserman

American Economic Review, May 2006

Relational Contracts and the Value of Loyalty

By Simon Board

American Economic Review, December 2011

This paper characterizes the optimal contract for a principal who repeatedly chooses among N potential agents under the threat of holdup. Over time, the principal would like to trade with different agents; however, the possibility of ex-post opportunism a...

Neglected Risks: The Psychology of Financial Crises

By Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny

American Economic Review, May 2015

We model a financial market in which investor beliefs are shaped by representativeness. Investors overreact to a series of good news, because such a series is representative of a good state. A few bad news do not change investor minds because the good sta...

Overconfidence and Diversification

By Yuval Heller

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

Experimental evidence suggests that people tend to be overconfident in the sense that they overestimate the accuracy of their private information. In this paper, we show that risk-averse principals might prefer overconfident agents in various strategic i...

Credo of a Lucky Textbook Author

By Paul A. Samuelson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

At war's end, introductory economics textbooks were overdue for a revolutionary advance. Change conspired to tempt the author to bring to the beginning course the rudiments of Keynesian macroeconomics. The impact was explosive. In reaction to criticisms o...

Report: Committee on Government Relations

By Robert Moffitt

American Economic Review, May 2013

Challenges in Merger Simulation Analysis

By Christopher R. Knittel and Konstantinos Metaxoglou

American Economic Review, May 2011

In this paper, we share our experience with merger simulations using a Random Coefficient Logit model on the demand side and assuming a static Bertrand game on the supply side. Drawing largely from our work in Knittel and Metaxoglou (2008), we show that d...

Facts and Figures on Intermediated Trade

By Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro, and Ignatius Horstmann

American Economic Review, May 2010

A Note on Liquidity Risk Management

By Markus K. Brunnermeier and Motohiro Yogo

American Economic Review, May 2009