The Design and Price of Information

By Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, and Alex Smolin

American Economic Review, January 2018

A data buyer faces a decision problem under uncertainty. He can augment his initial private information with supplemental data from a data seller. His willingness to pay for supplemental data is determined by the quality of his initial private information...

The Micro Origins of International Business-Cycle Comovement

By Julian di Giovanni, Andrei A. Levchenko, and Isabelle Mejean

American Economic Review, January 2018

This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business-cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added and international linkages over the period 1993–2007. At the micro level, trade and mul...

Trade, Quality Upgrading, and Input Linkages: Theory and Evidence from Colombia

By Ana Cecília Fieler, Marcela Eslava, and Daniel Yi Xu

American Economic Review, January 2018

A quantitative model brings together theories linking international trade to quality, technology, and demand for skills. Standard effects of trade on importers and exporters are magnified through domestic input linkages. We estimate the model with data fr...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2018

Either or Both Competition: A "Two-Sided" Theory of Advertising with Overlapping Viewerships

By Attila Ambrus, Emilio Calvano, and Markus Reisinger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

In media markets, consumers spread their attention to several outlets, increasingly so as consumption migrates online. The traditional framework for competition among media outlets rules out this behavior by assumption. We propose a new model that allows ...

Productivity Losses from Financial Frictions: Can Self-Financing Undo Capital Misallocation?

By Benjamin Moll

American Economic Review, October 2014

I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model in which heterogeneous producers face collateral constraints, and study the effect of financial frictions on capital misallocation and aggregate productivity. My economy is isomorphic to a Solow mo...

Comment on McKinnons's Monetary Rule

By John Williamson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

[This paper responds to "Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies for International Financial Stability: A Proposal," by Ronald I. McKinnon, in this same issue.] While McKinnon's criticisms of the regime of floating exchange rates are almost entirely justified...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Our favorite data visualizations from the past year

[Research Highlight]

June 30, 2017

Check out these graphics from the Research Highlight series

Sustainable Shadow Banking

By Guillermo Ordoñez

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

Banking regulation is beneficial because it constrains banks' portfolios to prevent excessive risk taking. But given that regulators usually know less than a bank about its investment opportunities, regulation comes at the cost of foregoing profitable inv...

Firms and the Decline in Earnings Inequality in Brazil

By Jorge Alvarez, Felipe Benguria, Niklas Engbom, and Christian Moser

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

We document a large decrease in earnings inequality in Brazil between 1996 and 2012. Using administrative linked employer-employee data, we fit high-dimensional worker and firm fixed-effects models to understand the sources of this decrease. Firm effects ...

The Possibility of Ideological Bias in Structural Macroeconomic Models

By Gilles Saint-Paul

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

An ideologically biased expert faces trade-offs in model design. The perceived model must be autocoherent—its use by all agents delivers a self-confirming equilibrium. Policy may be influenced by manipulating the Keynesian multiplier or the Phillips...

Procedural Analysis of Choice Rules with Applications to Bounded Rationality

By Yuval Salant

American Economic Review, April 2011

I study how limited abilities to process information affect choice behavior. I model the decision-making process by an automaton, and measure the complexity of a specific choice rule by the minimal number of states an automaton implementing the rule uses...

Linking Conflict to Inequality and Polarization

By Joan Esteban and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, June 2011

In this paper we study a behavioral model of conflict that provides a basis for choosing certain indices of dispersion as indicators for conflict. We show that a suitable monotone transform of the equilibrium level of conflict can be proxied by a linea...

Illegal Immigration and Immigration Control

[Symposium: Immigration]

By Barry R. Chiswick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed in the closing days of the 1986 legislative session. The primary purpose of IRCA is to remove illegal aliens from the U.S. labor market. It has two primary policy instruments. One is granting legal ...

The Costs of Remoteness: Evidence from German Division and Reunification

By Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm

American Economic Review, December 2008

This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence for the importance of market access for economic development. In line with a stand...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in the Field and the Laboratory

By Gary Charness and Marie-Claire Villeval

American Economic Review, June 2009

There is economic pressure to postpone the retirement age, but employers are still reluctant to employ older workers. We investigate the comparative behavior of juniors and seniors in experiments conducted both onsite with the employees of two large fi...

The Impact of Immigrants on Host Country Wages, Employment and Growth

[Symposium: Immigration]

By Rachel M. Friedberg and Jennifer Hunt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

The popular belief that immigrants have a large adverse impact on the wages and employment opportunities of the native-born population of the receiving country is not supported by the empirical evidence. A 10 percent increase in the fraction of immigrants...

Job Polarization and Structural Change

By Zsófia L. Bárány and Christian Siegel

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

We document that job polarization—contrary to the consensus—has started as early as the 1950s in the United States: middle-wage workers have been losing both in terms of employment and average wage growth compared to low- and high-wage workers...