What Makes Firm-Based Vocational Training Schemes Successful? The Role of Commitment

By Christian Dustmann and Uta Schönberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

This paper studies a possible market failure in the firm-based vocational training market: training may be too complex to be specified in a contract so that it is legally enforceable, resulting in the inability of firms to commit to training provision. We...

Financial Intermediation, International Risk Sharing, and Reserve Currencies

By Matteo Maggiori

American Economic Review, October 2017

I model the equilibrium risk sharing between countries with varying financial development. The most financially developed country takes greater risks because its financial intermediaries deal with funding problems better. In good times, the more financial...

Micro-loans, Insecticide-Treated Bednets, and Malaria: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Orissa, India

By Alessandro Tarozzi, Aprajit Mahajan, Brian Blackburn, Dan Kopf, Lakshmi Krishnan, and Joanne Yoong

American Economic Review, July 2014

We describe findings from the first large-scale cluster randomized controlled trial in a developing country that evaluates the uptake of a health-protecting technology, insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs), through micro-consumer loans, as compared to free ...

Indirect Liability for Copyright Infringement: Napster and Beyond

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By William Landes and Douglas Lichtman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

When individuals infringe copyright, they often use tools, services, and venues provided by other parties. An enduring legal question asks to what extent those other parties should be held liable for the resulting infringement. For example, should a firm ...

Choosing How to Compete: Strategies and Tactics in Standardization

[Symposium: Network Externalities]

By Stanley M. Besen and Joseph Farrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

In a network industry, each firm must decide whether or not it wants its product to be compatible with those of rivals. This horizontal compatibility strategy determines whether competition is a battle to establish a standard or the more conventional comp...

Stages of Diversification

By Jean Imbs and Romain Wacziarg

American Economic Review, March 2003

This paper studies the evolution of sectoral concentration in relation to the level of per capita income. We show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a U-shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources: countries first diversify, i...

Heterogeneity in Intra-monthly Consumption Patterns, Self-Control, and Savings at Retirement

By Giovanni Mastrobuoni and Matthew Weinberg

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009

Using data from the Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals, this paper describes the shape of consumption profiles over the month for Social Security benefit recipients that have saved different amounts for retirement. Individuals with income ...

A Rothschild-Stiglitz Approach to Bayesian Persuasion

By Matthew Gentzkow and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Review, May 2016

Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970) represent random variables as convex functions (integrals of the cumulative distribution function). Combining this representation with Blackwell's Theorem (1953), we characterize distributions of posterior means that can be ...

Globalization and U.S. Wages: Modifying Classic Theory to Explain Recent Facts

[Symposium: International Trade]

By Jonathan Haskel, Robert Z. Lawrence, Edward E. Leamer, and Matthew J. Slaughter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

This paper seeks to review how globalization might explain the recent trends in real and relative wages in the United States. We begin with an overview of what is new during the last 10-15 years in globalization, productivity, and patterns of U.S. earning...

Monetary Policy, Financial Stability, and the Zero Lower Bound

By Stanley Fischer

American Economic Review, May 2016

Much has happened in the world of central banking in the past decade. In this paper, I focus on three issues associated with the zero lower bound (ZLB) on short-term nominal interest rates and the nexus between monetary policy and financial stability: 1) ...

Owner-Occupied Housing and the Composition of the Household Portfolio

By Marjorie Flavin and Takashi Yamashita

American Economic Review, March 2002

Issues in the Design of Environmental Excise Taxes

By Thomas A. Barthold

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

This paper explores economic, political, and practical issues that arise in the design of environmental taxes. The observed dearth of Pigouvian taxes may result from perceived political or practical problems in the design of such taxes. The author provide...

The Dynamic Efficiency Costs of Common-Pool Resource Exploitation

By Ling Huang and Martin D. Smith

American Economic Review, December 2014

We conduct the first empirical investigation of common-pool resource users' dynamic and strategic behavior at the micro level using real-world data. Fishermen's strategies in a fully dynamic game account for latent resource dynamics and other players' ...

Market Failures and Public Policy

By Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, June 2015

The Law of the Few

By Andrea Galeotti and Sanjeev Goyal

American Economic Review, September 2010

Empirical work shows that a large majority of individuals get most of their information from a very small subset of the group, viz., the influencers; moreover, there exist only minor differences between the observable characteristics of the influencers an...

The Coming Global Climate-Technology Revolution

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Scott Barrett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases can be reduced significantly using existing technologies, but stabilizing concentrations will require a technological revolution--a "revolution" because it will require fundamental change, achieved within a rela...

A Theory of Crowdfunding: A Mechanism Design Approach with Demand Uncertainty and Moral Hazard

By Roland Strausz

American Economic Review, June 2017

Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under aggregate demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost information threatens...

Technological Innovations, Downside Risk, and the Modernization of Agriculture

By Kyle Emerick, Alain de Janvry, Elisabeth Sadoulet, and Manzoor H. Dar

American Economic Review, June 2016

We use a randomized experiment in India to show that improved technology enhances agricultural productivity by crowding in modern inputs and cultivation practices. Specifically, we show that a new rice variety that reduces downside risk by providing flood...

Group Identity and Social Preferences

By Yan Chen and Sherry Xin Li

American Economic Review, March 2009

We present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of induced group identity on social preferences. We find that when participants are matched with an ingroup member, they show a 47 percent increase in charity concerns and a 93 percent decrea...

Cooperation in a Dynamic Fishing Game: A Framed Field Experiment

By Charles N. Noussair, Daan van Soest, and Jan Stoop

American Economic Review, May 2015

We derive a dynamic theoretical model of renewable resource extraction. In the social optimum, maximum extraction occurs in the last period only, while in the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, the resource is depleted immediately. The predictions a...