The European Sovereign Debt Crisis

[Symposium: Government Debt]

By Philip R. Lane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

The origin and propagation of the European sovereign debt crisis can be attributed to the flawed original design of the euro. In particular, there was an incomplete understanding of the fragility of a monetary union under crisis conditions, especially in ...

Screening for Good Patent Pools through Price Caps on Individual Licenses

By Aleksandra Boutin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

Patent pools reduce prices when selling complementary inputs to technologies, but can also effectively cartelize markets when involving substitutes. Independent licensing, by reintroducing competition, ensures that only good pools form when there are two ...

School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature

By Dennis Epple, Richard E. Romano, and Miguel Urquiola

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

We review the theoretical, computational, and empirical research on school vouchers, with a focus on the latter. Our assessment is that the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis; howe...

New Evidence on the Aftermath of Financial Crises in Advanced Countries

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, October 2017

This paper examines the aftermath of postwar financial crises in advanced countries. We construct a new semiannual series on financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967-2012. The series is based on assessments of the health of countries' f...

Economic Perspectives on Privatization

By John Vickers and George Yarrow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

Despite being one of the most fundamental issues in political economy, the question of the appropriate boundary between public and private enterprise received relatively little attention in mainstream economic analysis until quite recently. In the 1980s, ...

The Impact of Insurance Provision on Household Production and Financial Decisions

By Jing Cai

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

This paper uses a natural experiment to study the impact of an agricultural insurance program on household production, borrowing, and saving behavior. The empirical strategy includes difference-in-differences and triple difference estimations. The resu...

Trade Costs, CO₂, and the Environment

By Joseph S. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

This paper quantifies how international trade affects CO2 emissions and analyzes the welfare consequences of regulating the CO2 emissions from shipping. To this end, the paper describes a model of trade and the environment, compiles ...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

By Steven J. Davis

American Economic Review, May 2010

Pinocchio's Pupil: Using Eyetracking and Pupil Dilation to Understand Truth Telling and Deception in Sender-Receiver Games

By Joseph Tao-yi Wang, Michael Spezio, and Colin F. Camerer

American Economic Review, June 2010

We report experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate. Subjects "overcommunicate" -- messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium. Eyetracking shows that senders look at payoffs i...

Rules, Communication, and Collusion: Narrative Evidence from the Sugar Institute Case

By David Genesove and Wallace P. Mullin

American Economic Review, June 2001

Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar-refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

The Persistence of Treatment Effects with Norm-Based Policy Instruments: Evidence from a Randomized Environmental Policy Experiment

By Paul J. Ferraro, Juan Jose Miranda, and Michael K. Price

American Economic Review, May 2011

Policymakers increasingly use norm-based messages to promote conservation efforts. Despite the apparent success of such strategies, empirical analyses have thus far focused exclusively on short-run effects. From a policy perspective, however, whether and ...

Explaining Charter School Effectiveness

By Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Lottery estimates suggest Massachusetts' urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond that of traditional urban public schools students, while nonurban charters reduce achievement from a higher baseline. The fact that urban charters are most eff...

On the Selection of Arbitrators

By Geoffroy de Clippel, Kfir Eliaz, and Brian Knight

American Economic Review, November 2014

A key feature of arbitration is the possibility for conflicting parties to participate in the selection of the arbitrator, the individual who will rule the case. We analyze this problem of the selection of arbitrators from the perspective of implementatio...

Clunkers or Junkers? Adverse Selection in a Vehicle Retirement Program

By Ryan Sandler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

Vehicle retirement programs have become popular tools of public policy for reducing pollution. The efficacy of these programs is difficult to measure, as it is difficult to tell how much a vehicle would have polluted otherwise. I estimate that counterfact...

The Power of Communication

By David Rahman

American Economic Review, November 2014

In this paper, I offer two ways in which firms can collude: secret monitoring and infrequent coordination. Such collusion is enforceable with intuitive communication protocols. I make my case in the context of a repeated Cournotoligopoly with flexible pr...

Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second-Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords

By Benjamin Edelman, Michael Ostrovsky, and Michael Schwarz

American Economic Review, March 2007

We investigate the "generalized second-price" (GSP) auction, a new mechanism used by search engines to sell online advertising. Although GSP looks similar to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, its properties are very different. Unlike the VCG m...

Manipulation of Social Program Eligibility

By Adriana Camacho and Emily Conover

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

We document how manipulation of a targeting system for social welfare programs evolves over time. First, there was strategic behavior of some local politicians in the timing of the household interviews around local elections. Then, there was corrupt beha...

Are There Environmental Benefits from Driving Electric Vehicles? The Importance of Local Factors

By Stephen P. Holland, Erin T. Mansur, Nicholas Z. Muller, and Andrew J. Yates

American Economic Review, December 2016

We combine a theoretical discrete-choice model of vehicle purchases, an econometric analysis of electricity emissions, and the AP2 air pollution model to estimate the geographic variation in the environmental benefits from driving electric vehicles. The s...

Flip-Flopping, Primary Visibility, and the Selection of Candidates

By Marina Agranov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

We present an incomplete information model of two-stage elections in which candidates can choose different platforms in primaries and general elections. Voters do not directly observe the chosen platforms, but infer the candidates’ ideologies from ob...