Law, Coercion, and Expression: A Review Essay on Frederick Schauer's The Force of Law and Richard McAdams's The Expressive Powers of Law

By Eric Rasmusen

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

What is law and why do people obey it? This question from jurisprudence has recently been tackled using the tools of economics. The field of law and economics has long studied how fines and imprisonment affect behavior. Nobody believes, however, that all ...

The Medium-Term Impact of Medicare Part D on Pharmaceutical Prices

By Mark G. Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton

American Economic Review, May 2011

Medicare Part D began coverage of prescription drugs in 2006. Using data from the first year of the program we found that Part D reduced pharmaceutical prices for Medicare recipients, with these effects driven by enrollees previously without drug coverage...

Can Mobile Phones Improve Learning? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Niger

By Jenny C. Aker, Christopher Ksoll, and Travis J. Lybbert

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

The returns to educational investments hinge on whether such investments can improve the quality and persistence of educational gains. We report the results from a randomized evaluation of an adult education program in Niger, in which some students learne...

The Winner's Curse and Public Information in Common Value Auctions: Comment

By James C. Cox, Samuel H. Dinkin, and Vernon L. Smith

American Economic Review, March 1999

The Real Effects of Monetary Shocks in Sticky Price Models: A Sufficient Statistic Approach

By Fernando Alvarez, Hervé Le Bihan, and Francesco Lippi

American Economic Review, October 2016

We prove that the ratio of kurtosis to the frequency of price changes is a sufficient statistic for the real effects of monetary shocks, measured by the cumulated output response following the shock. The sufficient statistic result holds in a large class ...

Reviews of the 2006 Economic Report of the President

By Alan Auerbach, Rebecca Blank, Martin Feldstein, Michael Katz, and Kenneth Rogoff

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2006

The Journal of Economic Literature regularly reviews books of interest to the economics profession. The 2006 Economic Report of the President (ERP) falls under that purview. In the reviews that follow, Martin Feldstein reviews the overview c...

Mechanism Design in Large Games: Incentives and Privacy

By Michael Kearns, Mallesh M. Pai, Aaron Roth, and Jonathan Ullman

American Economic Review, May 2014

We study the design of mechanisms satisfying a novel desideratum: privacy. This requires the mechanism not reveal "much" about any agent's type to other agents. We propose the notion of joint differential privacy: a variant of differential privacy used in...

Does Affirmative Action Work? Caste, Gender, College Quality, and Academic Success in India

By Surendrakumar Bagde, Dennis Epple, and Lowell Taylor

American Economic Review, June 2016

Public policy in modern India features affirmative action programs intended to reduce inequality that stems from a centuries-old caste structure and history of disparate treatment by gender. We study the effects of one such affirmative action program: an ...

Heterogeneity in Returns to Wealth and the Measurement of Wealth Inequality

By Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, Davide Malacrino, and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, May 2016

Lacking a long time series on the assets of the very wealthy, Saez and Zucman (2015) use US tax records to obtain estimates of wealth holdings by capitalizing asset income from tax returns. They document marked upward trends in wealth concentration. We us...

The Internet and the Investor

[Symposium: E-Commerce]

By Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

The Intellectual Legacy of Progressive Economics: A Review Essay of Thomas C. Leonard's Illiberal Reformers

By Marshall I. Steinbaum and Bernard A. Weisberger

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Thomas Leonard's 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era argues that exclusionary views on eugenics, race, immigration, and gender taint the intellectual legacy of progressive economics and eco...

Mafia in the Ballot Box

By Giuseppe De Feo and Giacomo Davide De Luca

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

We study the impact of organized crime on electoral results, analyzing in detail the national parliamentary elections in Sicily for the period 1946-1992. We document the significant support given by the Sicilian mafia to the Christian Democratic Party whe...

Global Biofuels: Key to the Puzzle of Grain Market Behavior

[Symposium: Agriculture]

By Brian Wright

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

In the last half-decade, sharp jumps in the prices of wheat, rice, and corn, which furnish about two-thirds of the calorie requirements of mankind, have attracted worldwide attention. These price jumps in grains have also revealed the chaotic state of e...

Experimental Testing of Intrinsic Preferences for NonInstrumental Information

By Kfir Eliaz and Andrew Schotter

American Economic Review, May 2007

Preferential Trade Liberalization: The Traditional Theory and New Developments

By Arvind Panagariya

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2000

This paper begins by systematically developing the "static" theory of preferential trade areas (PTAs) and showing that neither a large volume of initial intra-union trade nor geographical proximity can serve as a guide to welfare enhancing PTAs. The paper...

Toward a Theory of Regulation for Developing Countries: Following Jean-Jacques Laffont's Lead

By Antonio Estache and Liam Wren-Lewis

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009

The efficient operation and expansion of infrastructures in developing countries is crucial for growth and poverty reduction. However, recent reforms aimed at improving the performance of these sectors have had limited success. Evidence suggests that, ...

After Airline Deregulation and Alfred E. Kahn

By Nancy L. Rose

American Economic Review, May 2012

Among Alfred E. "Fred" Kahn's many accomplishments, none is better remembered than his pivotal role in deregulation of the US airline industry. Kahn's commitment to marry core microeconomic principles with institutional analysis, willingness as Chairman o...

Report of the Treasurer

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2016

Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

This paper discusses simple ultimatum games, two-stage bargaining ultimatum games, and multistage ultimatum games. Finally, I discuss ultimatums in the market. Any time a monopolist (or monopsonist) sets a price (or wage), it has the quality of an ultimat...

Patent Remedies

By Carl Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2016

Since the Supreme Court's eBay decision in 2006, the U.S. has employed a hybrid patent remedy system that mixes property and liability rules. When the patent owner and the infringer are competitors, the courts typically issue a permanent injunction requir...