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...

US 2050 Call for Proposals

[News]

December 14, 2017

The US 2050 initiative is offering grants for individual papers; proposals are due by January 22, 2018

Markup and Cost Dispersion across Firms: Direct Evidence from Producer Surveys in Pakistan

By David Atkin, Azam Chaudhry, Shamyla Chaudhry, Amit K. Khandelwal, and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review, May 2015

Researchers typically invoke theoretical assumptions to estimate mark-ups. Instead, we directly obtain mark-ups by surveying Pakistani soccer-ball producers. We document six facts: (i) Mark-ups are more dispersed than costs; (ii) Mark-ups and costs increa...

Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?

By Susanto Basu, John G. Fernald, and Miles S. Kimball

American Economic Review, December 2006

Yes. We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for aggregation effects, varying utilization of capital and labor, nonconstant returns, and imperfect competition. On impact, when technology improves, input use and nonresidential...

Do Economists Make Bad Citizens?

By Robert H. Frank, Thomas D. Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

Although field experiments and classroom surveys are ambiguous about whether economists are less likely than others to cooperate in social dilemmas, three important points remain clear: economics training encourages the view that people are motivated prim...

Retrospectives: Lange and von Mises, Large-Scale Enterprises, and the Economic Case for Socialism

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

In the debates over "economic calculation" launched by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and extending well into the 1940s, the central issue concerned the ability of a socialist economy to achieve allocative efficiency. Von Mises emphasized that a collectivist st...