Becoming the Neighbor Bidder: Endogenous Winner's Curse in Dynamic Mechanisms

By Alejandro Francetich

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

This paper addresses the problem of sequentially allocating time sensitive goods, or one-period leases on a durable good, among agents who compete through time and learn about the common component of their valuation privately through experience. I show th...

Sale Rates and Price Movements in Art Auctions

By Orley Ashenfelter and Kathryn Graddy

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper examines the relationship between sale rates and price shocks in art auctions. Using data on contemporary and impressionist art, we show that while sale rates appear to have little relationship to current prices, there exists a strong negative ...

Semiparametric Censored Regression Models

[Symposium: Econometric Tools]

By Kenneth Y. Chay and James L. Powell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

When data are censored, ordinary least squares regression can provide biased coefficient estimates. Maximum likelihood approaches to this problem are valid only if the error distribution is correctly specified, which can be problematic in practice. We rev...

Robert E. Lucas Jr.'s Collected Papers on Monetary Theory

By Thomas J. Sargent

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2015

This paper is a critical review of and a reader's guide to a collection of papers by Robert E. Lucas, Jr. about fruitful ways of using general equilibrium theories to understand measured economic aggregates. These beautifully written and wisely argued pap...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics One-Hundred-Fifth Annual List

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2008

Earnings, Disposable Income, and Consumption of Allowed and Rejected Disability Insurance Applicants

By Andreas Ravndal Kostøl and Magne Mogstad

American Economic Review, May 2015

Two key questions in thinking about the size and growth of the disability insurance program are to what extent it discourages work, and how valuable the insurance is to individuals and families. These questions motivate our paper. We begin by describing t...

The Making of an Economist

By David Colander and Arjo Klamer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

As economists, we have an interest in and individual knowledge of the initiation process that turns students into professional economists. However, other than anecdotal evidence, very little in the way of data exists. This paper is a step toward providing...

The Test of Understanding of College Economics

By William B. Walstad and Ken Rebeck

American Economic Review, May 2008

Disability Screening and Labor Supply: Evidence from South Africa

By Sophie Mitra

American Economic Review, May 2009

Privacy and Data-Based Research

[Symposium: Big Data]

By Ori Heffetz and Katrina Ligett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

What can we, as users of microdata, formally guarantee to the individuals (or firms) in our dataset, regarding their privacy? We retell a few stories, well-known in data-privacy circles, of failed anonymization attempts in publicly released datasets. We t...

From Inflation to More Inflation, Disinflation, and Low Inflation

By Allan H. Meltzer

American Economic Review, May 2006

Equity Effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986

[Symposium: Tax Reform Act of 1986]

By Jane G. Gravelle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

The major goals of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 included an increase in the equity of the tax system. We will consider the effects of the tax reform on vertical equity, horizontal equity, and intergenerational equity.

Using Tax Expenditures to Achieve Energy Policy Goals

By Gilbert E. Metcalf

American Economic Review, May 2008

Consumption Insurance: An Evaluation of Risk-Bearing Systems in Low-Income Economies

[Symposium: Consumption Smoothing in Developing Countries]

By Robert M. Townsend

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

The hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low-income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems. In many contexts, idiosyncratic risks are high, so credit/insurance arrangements could be beneficial. Statistical tests ...

Wasteful Sanctions, Underperformance, and Endogenous Supervision

By David A. Miller and Kareen Rozen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

We study optimal contracting in team settings where agents have many opportunities to shirk, task-level monitoring is needed to provide useful incentives, and it is difficult to write individual performance into formal contracts. Incentives are provided ...

Unemployment Benefits, Unemployment Duration, and Post-Unemployment Jobs: A Regression Discontinuity Approach

By Rafael Lalive

American Economic Review, May 2007

Is the Taxable Income Elasticity Sufficient to Calculate Deadweight Loss? The Implications of Evasion and Avoidance

By Raj Chetty

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009

Martin Feldstein's (1999) widely used taxable income formula for deadweight loss assumes the marginal social cost of evasion and avoidance equals the tax rate. This condition is likely to be violated in practice for two reasons. First, some of the cost...

Trust in Public Institutions over the Business Cycle

By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

American Economic Review, May 2011

We document that trust in public institutions—and particularly trust in banks, business and government—has declined over recent years. US time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions....

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...

Comparing Apples to Oranges: Productivity Convergence and Measurement across Industries and Countries: Comment

By Anders Sorensen

American Economic Review, September 2001