Cooperative Investments and the Value of Contracting

By Yeon-Koo Che and Donald B. Hausch

American Economic Review, March 1999

Recent articles have shown that contracts can support the efficient outcome for bilateral trade even in the face of specific investments and incomplete contracting. These studies typically considered 'selfish' investments that benefit the investor (e.g., ...

The Role of Information in Medical Markets: An Analysis of Publicly Reported Outcomes in Cardiac Surgery

By David M. Cutler, Robert S. Huckman, and Mary Beth Landrum

American Economic Review, May 2004

Risk Preferences in the PSID: Individual Imputations and Family Covariation

By Miles S. Kimball, Claudia R. Sahm, and Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2009

International Liquidity in a Multipolar World

By Barry Eichengreen

American Economic Review, May 2012

Today's global monetary and financial system, to a remarkable extent, continues to rely on the U.S. dollar for international liquidity. This reflects the currency's historic role, the liquidity of American financial markets, and the absence of alternativ...

Policy Watch: Child Support Policies

By Robert I. Lerman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

With more parents living apart, the societal problem of parents who fail to share with each other or with their children becomes more acute. Although governments have mainly relied on public transfers to address the resulting economic hardships among chil...

Productivity and Selection of Human Capital with Machine Learning

By Aaron Chalfin, Oren Danieli, Andrew Hillis, Zubin Jelveh, Michael Luca, Jens Ludwig, and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2016

Economists have become increasingly interested in studying the nature of production functions in social policy applications, with the goal of improving productivity. Traditionally models have assumed workers are homogenous inputs. However, in practice, su...

The Impact of Challenge Quizzes on Student Knowledge

By KimMarie McGoldrick and Peter W. Schuhmann

American Economic Review, May 2016

We evaluate the efficacy of a blended formative/summative assessment tool developed to support mastery learning by students without placing undue burden on instructors. Our innovation provides students with an opportunity to take a more difficult "challen...

Copyright Research in the Digital Age: Moving from Piracy to the Supply of New Products

By Joel Waldfogel

American Economic Review, May 2012

Twelve years into the Napster era, economists have devoted substantial attention to revenue consequences of unpaid file sharing. Yet, this is only one of a host of questions whose answers are needed to inform evidence-based copyright policy in the digita...

The Economic Significance of National Border Effects

By Carolyn L. Evans

American Economic Review, September 2003

To address the economic significance of national border effects, this paper provides evidence on two fundamental questions: (1) Do large border effects arise because of high perceived-price wedges between foreign and domestic products, or because imports ...

Safe Assets, Liquidity, and Monetary Policy

By Pierpaolo Benigno and Salvatore Nisticò

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2017

This paper studies monetary policy in models where multiple assets have different liquidity properties: safe and "pseudo-safe" assets coexist. A shock worsening the liquidity properties of the pseudo-safe assets raises interest rate spreads and can cause ...

Tallest in the World: Native Americans of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century

By Richard H. Steckel and Joseph M. Prince

American Economic Review, March 2001

The Early Development of Intellectual Property Institutions in the United States

By B. Zorina Khan and Kenneth L. Sokoloff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

The U.S. was a pioneer in establishing the world's first modern intellectual property system. That system was distinguished by the provision of broad access to, and strict enforcement of, property rights in new inventions, coupled with the requirement of ...

Capital Flow Management

By Olivier Jeanne

American Economic Review, May 2012

There is a wide variety in the capital account policies of emerging markets and developing economies. Some countries, such as Brazil, have recently experimented with prudential controls on capital inflows, whereas others, such as China, have continued to ...

Market Regulations, Prices, and Productivity

By Gilbert Cette, Jimmy Lopez, and Jacques Mairesse

American Economic Review, May 2016

This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to infer the consequences on productivity entailed by anticompetitive regulations in product and labor markets through their impacts on production prices and wages. Results show that changes in production...

Financiers versus Engineers: Should the Financial Sector Be Taxed or Subsidized?

By Thomas Philippon

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

I study the allocation of human capital in an economy with production externalities, financial constraints, and career choices. Agents choose to become entrepreneurs, workers, or financiers. Entrepreneurship has positive externalities but requires the ser...

Do Expectations Matter? The Great Moderation Revisited

By Fabio Canova and Luca Gambetti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

We examine the role of expectations in the Great Moderation episode. We derive theoretical restrictions in a New-Keynesian model and test them using measures of expectations obtained from survey data, the Greenbook and bond markets. Expectations explain t...

Do Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Child Health? Evidence from PROGRESA's Control Randomized Experiment

By Paul Gertler

American Economic Review, May 2004

Robustness to Parametric Assumptions in Missing Data Models

By Bryan S. Graham and Keisuke Hirano

American Economic Review, May 2011

We consider estimation of population averages when data are missing at random. If some cells contain few observations, there can be substantial gains from imposing parametric restrictions on the cell means, but there is also a danger of misspecification. ...

Bailouts and the Optimal Taxation of Bonus Pay

By Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper argues that the possibility of bailouts to financial intermediaries distorts the supply price of capital and creates an argument for taxing financial bonuses separately from other sources of income. We develop a model of financial contracting w...

Network Effects, Congestion Externalities, and Air Traffic Delays: Or Why Not All Delays Are Evil

By Christopher Mayer and Todd Sinai

American Economic Review, September 2003

We examine two factors that explain air traffic congestion: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. While both factors impact congestion, we find that the hubbing effect dominates empirically. Hub carriers incur most of the additiona...