Call for Proposals: The Pacific Center for Asset Management at UCSD

[News]

October 16, 2020

The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2020.

The rise of the service economy

[Research Highlight]

October 16, 2020

Structural changes are reshaping growth, interest rates, and investment in the world’s economies.

The Rise of Services and Balanced Growth in Theory and Data

By Miguel León-Ledesma and Alessio Moro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2020

We investigate the effect of structural transformation on the process of economic growth. Using a two-sector growth model we show that, in addition to Baumol's cost disease, structural transformation from goods to services generates other predictions that...

Nudging science in new directions

[Page]

How much does it cost to coax researchers outside of their comfort zones?

Call for Papers for TeachECONference2021

[News]

October 21, 2020

Call for Papers: SSSA New Orleans 2021

[News]

October 22, 2020

The meeting will be held on April 15-17, 2021.

Radio war

[Research Highlight]

October 19, 2020

How much did foreign news broadcasts contribute to the Italian resistance in WWII?

War of the Waves: Radio and Resistance during World War II

By Stefano Gagliarducci, Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato, Francesco Sobbrio, and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

We analyze the role of the media in coordinating and mobilizing insurgency against an authoritarian regime, in the context of the Nazi-fascist occupation of Italy during WWII. We study the effect of BBC radio on the intensity of internal resistance. By ex...

Deadly incentives

[Page]

In Colombia, stronger incentives for the military to kill rebels backfired.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

Optimal Collateralized Contracts

By Dan Cao and Roger Lagunoff

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

We examine the role of collateral in a dynamic model of optimal credit contracts in which a borrower values both housing and nonhousing consumption. The borrower's private information about his income is the only friction. An optimal contract is collatera...

Information Transmission under the Shadow of the Future: An Experiment

By Alistair J. Wilson and Emanuel Vespa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

We experimentally examine how information transmission functions in an ongoing relationship. Where the one-shot cheap-talk literature documents substantial overcommunication and preferences for honesty, the outcomes in our repeated setting are more consis...

Testable Implications of Models of Intertemporal Choice: Exponential Discounting and Its Generalizations

By Federico Echenique, Taisuke Imai, and Kota Saito

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

We present revealed-preference characterizations of the most common models of intertemporal choice: the model of exponentially discounted concave utility, and some of its generalizations. Our characterizations take consumption data as primitives, and prov...

The Importance of Commitment Power in Games with Imperfect Evidence

By Francisco Silva

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

The literature initiated by Green and Laffont (1986) studies principal-agent models with hard evidence. Evidence is modeled by assuming that the message set of the agent is type dependent. In this setup, Glazer and Rubinstein (2004, 2006) and Sher (2011) ...

Hybrid All-Pay and Winner-Pay Contests

By Johan N. M. Lagerlöf

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

In many contests in economic and political life, both all-pay and winner-pay expenditures matter for winning. This paper studies such hybrid contests under symmetry and asymmetry. The symmetric model assumes very little structure but yields a simple close...

Informational Cycles in Search Markets

By Eeva Mauring

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

I show that market participants' equilibrium beliefs can create fluctuations in the volume of trading, even in a stationary environment. I study a sequential search model where buyers face an unknown distribution of offers. Each buyer learns about the dis...

Codiffusion of Technologies in Social Networks

By Natalia Lazzati

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

This paper studies the diffusion process of two complementary technologies among people who are connected through a social network. It characterizes adoption rates over time for different initial allocations and network structures. In doing so, we provide...

The Value of Incumbency When Platforms Face Heterogeneous Customers

By Gary Biglaiser and Jacques Crémer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

We study competition for the market in a dynamic model with network externalities, focusing on the efficiency of market outcomes. We propose a representation of the strategic advantages of incumbency and embed it in a dynamic framework with heterogeneous ...