Scaling for Economists: Lessons from the Non-Adherence Problem in the Medical Literature

[Symposium: From Experiments to Economic Policy]

By Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A. List, Danielle LoRe, and Dana Suskind

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Economists often conduct experiments that demonstrate the benefits to individuals of modifying their behavior, such as using a new production process at work or investing in energy saving technologies. A common occurrence is for the success of the interve...

Recognition for Group Work: Gender Differences in Academia

By Heather Sarsons

American Economic Review, May 2017

How is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed? I use data on academics' publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit is allocated under such uncertainty. While solo-authore...

The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change

By Ronald Lee

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

The global demographic transition began around 1800 in Europe with declining mortality followed by declining fertility, trends which spread around the world and continue in this century. At the aggregate level, population size greatly increased, growth ac...

Monopoly Price Discrimination and Demand Curvature

By Iñaki Aguirre, Simon Cowan, and John Vickers

American Economic Review, September 2010

This paper presents a general analysis of the effects of monopolistic third-degree price discrimination on welfare and output when all markets are served. Sufficient conditions — involving straightforward comparisons of the curvatures of the direct...

R&D, International Sourcing, and the Joint Impact on Firm Performance

By Esther Ann Bøler, Andreas Moxnes, and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe

American Economic Review, December 2015

This paper studies the impact of an R&D cost shock on R&D investments, imported inputs, and their joint impact on firm performance. We introduce imported inputs into a model of R&D and endogenous productivity, and show that R&D and international sourcing ...

A Group Rule-Utilitarian Approach to Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence

By Stephen Coate and Michael Conlin

American Economic Review, December 2004

This paper explores a group rule–utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout, inspired by the theoretical work of John C. Harsanyi (1980) and Timothy J. Feddersen and Alvaro Sandroni (2002). It develops a model based on this approach and studies...

Sales Taxes and Internet Commerce

By Liran Einav, Dan Knoepfle, Jonathan Levin, and Neel Sundaresan

American Economic Review, January 2014

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using eBay data. Our first approach exploits the fact that a seller's location—and therefore the applicable tax rate—is revealed only after a buyer has expressed interest in a...

How Regional Blocs Affect Excluded Countries: The Price Effects of MERCOSUR

By Won Chang and L. Alan Winters

American Economic Review, September 2002

The welfare effects of PTAs are most directly linked to changes in trade prices, i.e., the terms of trade. This paper employs a simple strategic pricing game in segmented markets to measure the effects of MERCOSUR on the pricing of "nonmember" exports to ...

Inflows of Capital to Developing Countries in the 1990s

By Guillermo A. Calvo, Leonardo Leiderman, and Carmen M. Reinhart

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Half a decade has passed since the resurgence of international capital flows to many developing countries and history has, once again, shown that foreign investment is prone to repeated booms and busts. Mexico's 1994 crisis is but a recent example that hi...

Habit Formation in Consumer Preferences: Evidence from Panel Data

By Karen E. Dynan

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper tests for the presence of habit formation using household data. A simple model of habit formation implies a condition relating the strength of habits to the evolution of consumption over time. When the condition is estimated with food consumpti...

Why Have College Completion Rates Declined? An Analysis of Changing Student Preparation and Collegiate Resources

By John Bound, Michael F. Lovenheim, and Sarah Turner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Rising college enrollment over the last quarter century has not been met with a proportional increase in college completion. Comparing the high school classes of 1972 and 1992, we show declines in college completion rates have been most pronounced for men...

Fixing Market Failures or Fixing Elections? Agricultural Credit in India

By Shawn Cole

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

This paper integrates theories of political budget cycles with theories of tactical electoral redistribution to test for political capture in a novel way. Studying banks in India, I find that government-owned bank lending tracks the electoral cycle, wi...

The Economics of Governance

By Oliver E. Williamson

American Economic Review, May 2005

Macroeconomic Modeling for Monetary Policy Evaluation

[Symposium: Monetary Policy]

By Jordi Galí and Mark Gertler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

We describe some of the main features of the recent vintage of macroeconomic models used for monetary policy evaluation. We point to some of the key differences with respect to the earlier generation of macro models and highlight the insights for policy t...

No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012

By Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger

American Economic Review, February 2017

How have house prices evolved over the long run? This paper presents annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. We show that real house prices stayed constant from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, but rose strongly and with subs...

Antidumping Investigations and the Pass-Through of Antidumping Duties and Exchange Rates: Reply

By Bruce A. Blonigen and Stephen E. Haynes

American Economic Review, June 2010

This reply responds to a comment that correctly identifies an invalid assumption in our original article that antidumping (AD) duties are subtracted from the U.S. price when calculating AD duties in administrative reviews. While this point invalidates our...

Searching and Learning by Trial and Error

By Steven Callander

American Economic Review, October 2011

I study a dynamic model of trial-and-error search in which agents do not have complete knowledge of how choices are mapped into outcomes. Agents learn about the mapping by observing the choices of earlier agents and the outcomes that are realized. The key...

Public Goods, Social Pressure, and the Choice between Privacy and Publicity

By Andrew F. Daughety and Jennifer F. Reinganum

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

We model privacy as an agent's choice of action being unobservable to others. An agent derives utility from his action, the aggregate of agents' actions, and other agents' perceptions of his type. If his action is unobservable, he takes his full-informati...

The Geography of Trade in Online Transactions: Evidence from eBay and MercadoLibre

By Ali Hortaçsu, F. Asís Martínez-Jerez, and Jason Douglas

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2009

We analyze geographic patterns of trade between individuals using transactions data from eBay and MercadoLibre, two large online auction sites. We find that distance continues to be an important deterrent to trade between geographically separated buyer...

Systems Competition and Network Effects

[Symposium: Network Externalities]

By Michael L. Katz and Carl Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

This paper discusses firm behavior, market performance, and the public and private institutions that arise in systems markets, i.e., markets where consumers use compatible components together to generate benefits. In such markets, which include communicat...