Social Comparisons and Contributions to Online Communities: A Field Experiment on MovieLens

By Yan Chen, F. Maxwell Harper, Joseph Konstan, and Sherry Xin Li

American Economic Review, September 2010

We design a field experiment to explore the use of social comparison to increase contributions to an online community. We find that, after receiving behavioral information about the median user's total number of movie ratings, users below the median demon...

Retrospectives: Classical Family Values: Ending the Poor Laws as They Knew Them

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Poor law reform in the early 1830s provides a key example of the deep conflicts between classical liberal principles of self-reliance and the realities of dependency. Eminent economists, such as Nassau Senior and Thomas Malthus, argued that the dependency...

Markets: Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?

By Benjamin Edelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

This paper studies the adult online entertainment industry, particularly the consumption side of the market. In particular, it focuses on the demographics and consumption patterns of those who subscribe to adult entertainment websites. On the surface, thi...

Subways, Strikes, and Slowdowns: The Impacts of Public Transit on Traffic Congestion

By Michael L. Anderson

American Economic Review, September 2014

Public transit accounts for 1 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled but attracts strong public support. Using a simple choice model, we predict that transit riders are likely to be individuals who commute along routes with severe roadway delays. These ...

Does Welfare Inhibit Success? The Long-Term Effects of Removing Low-Income Youth from the Disability Rolls

By Manasi Deshpande

American Economic Review, November 2016

I estimate the effects of removing low-income youth with disabilities from Supplemental Security Income (SSI) on their earnings and income in adulthood. Using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews, I fin...

In with the Big, Out with the Small: Removing Small-Scale Reservations in India

By Leslie A. Martin, Shanthi Nataraj, and Ann E. Harrison

American Economic Review, February 2017

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates jobs. We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60 years, SSI promotion in India focused on rese...

Black-White Earnings Differentials: Privatization versus Deregulation

By James Peoples and Wayne K. Talley

American Economic Review, May 2001

Climate Treaties and "Breakthrough" Technologies

By Scott Barrett

American Economic Review, May 2006

Excess Male Infant Mortality: The Gene-Institution Interactions

By Roland Pongou, Barthelemy Kuate Defo, and Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

American Economic Review, May 2017

Excess male mortality at early ages is an important source of child inequality in most societies. We examine how improvement in the quality of political institutions affects the male survival disadvantage. Using data on twins in combination with a natural...

Prospect Theory as Efficient Perceptual Distortion

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, May 2012

The paper proposes a theory of efficient perceptual distortions, in which the statistical relation between subjective perceptions and the objective state minimizes the error of the state estimate, subject to a constraint on information processing capacity...

Zipf's Law, Pareto's Law, and the Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States

By Shuhei Aoki and Makoto Nirei

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

We construct a tractable neoclassical growth model that generates Pareto's law of income distribution and Zipf's law of the firm size distribution from idiosyncratic, firm-level productivity shocks. Executives and entrepreneurs invest in risk-free assets,...

A Preanalysis Plan to Replicate Sixty Economics Research Papers That Worked Half of the Time

By Andrew C. Chang and Phillip Li

American Economic Review, May 2017

We attempted to replicate 67 macroeconomic papers using author-provided data and code files by following a preanalysis plan. Excluding 6 papers that used confidential data, we obtained data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83 percent) that ...

Offshoring and Directed Technical Change

By Daron Acemoglu, Gino Gancia, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

We study the implications of offshoring on innovation, technology, and wage inequality in a Ricardian model with directed technical change. Profit maximization determines both the extent of offshoring and the direction of technological progress. A fall in...

Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy

By Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, August 2011

This study presents a framework to include environmental externalities into a system of national accounts. The paper estimates the air pollution damages for each industry in the United States. An integrated-assessment model quantifies the marginal damages...

MM--Past, Present, Future

By Franco Modigliani

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

[This is a comment on "The Modigliani-Miller Propositions after Thirty Years" by Merton H. Miller in this same issue.] Before getting serious about the MM theorem's past and future, I would like to say a few words about its more personal history, includin...

Eponymous Entrepreneurs

By Sharon Belenzon, Aaron K. Chatterji, and Brendan Daley

American Economic Review, June 2017

We demonstrate that eponymy—firms being named after their owners—is linked to superior firm performance, but is relatively uncommon (about 19 percent of firms in our data). We propose an explanation based on eponymy creating an association bet...

The Economist in Tort Litigation

[Symposium: Economists as Expert Witnesses]

By Robert Thornton and John Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

In recent decades, the involvement of economists as consultants and expert witnesses in civil tort actions has grown rapidly. In this article, the authors discuss the reasons for this phenomenon and the extent to conflicts of interest to arise in the prac...

Policy Watch: U.S. Economic Policy toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

By Susan M. Collins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

As the Soviet Union and the countries in Eastern Europe take steps towards market economies and democratic political systems, the U.S. and other western countries have been confronted by a range of difficult and important questions about the appropriate e...

Economic FAQs About the Internet

[Symposium: Internet]

By Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Hal Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

This is a set for frequently asked questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet. The authors describe the current state of the Internet, discuss some of the pressing economic and regulatory problem...

Trends in the Publication of Empirical Economics

By David Figlio

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

This paper documents recent trends in the publication of empirical articles in general-interest economics journals. Three measures of journal quality are estimated. The author finds substantial differences in publication rates of empirical articles among ...