Regulation, Competition and Liberalization

By Mark Armstrong and David E.M. Sappington

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2006

In many countries throughout the world, regulators are struggling to determine whether and how to introduce competition into regulated industries. This essay examines the complexities involved in the liberalization process. While stressing the importanc...

Growth Dynamics: The Myth of Economic Recovery

By Valerie Cerra and Sweta Chaman Saxena

American Economic Review, March 2008

Using panel data for a large set of high-income, emerging market, developing, and transition countries, we find robust evidence that the large output loss from financial crises and some types of political crises is highly persistent. The results on financ...

Consumption Volatility, Marketization, and Expenditure in an Emerging Market Economy

By Daniel L. Hicks

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2015

In response to income fluctuations, households smooth consumption by substituting between market expenditure and time inputs. This paper provides evidence of this substitution in the context of food consumption over transitory and permanent income fluctua...

Trade Costs, 1870-2000

By David S. Jacks, Christopher M. Meissner, and Dennis Novy

American Economic Review, May 2008

Preferences over Inflation and Unemployment: Evidence from Surveys of Happiness

By Rafael Di Tella, Robert J. MacCulloch, and Andrew J. Oswald

American Economic Review, March 2001

Intelligence, Social Mobility, and Growth

By John Hassler and Jose V. Rodriguez Mora

American Economic Review, September 2000

We develop a model where the allocation of human resources, intergenerational social mobility, and technological growth are jointly determined. High growth endogenously increases the equilibrium return to innate cognitive ability and makes the allocation ...

Manager-Investor Conflicts in Mutual Funds

By Paul G. Mahoney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Half of all of U.S. households own shares in one or more mutual funds, either directly or through personal or employer-sponsored retirement accounts. This article describes the structure and regulation of mutual funds and the resulting incentives facing t...

Identifying Hedonic Models

By Ivar Ekeland, James J. Heckman, and Lars Nesheim

American Economic Review, May 2002

Law and Finance "at the Origin"

By Ulrike Malmendier

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

What are the key determinants of financial development and growth? A large literature debates the relative importance of countries' legal and political environment. In this paper, I present evidence from ancient Rome, where an early form of shareholder ...

Purple America

[Symposium: Red and Blue States]

By Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James M. Snyder Jr.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

America, we are told, is a nation divided. The cartographers who draw up the maps of U.S. election results have branded a new division in American politics: Republican red versus Democratic blue. What is the source of this division? Most observers point n...

Derivative Assets Analysis

[Symposium: Arbitrage]

By Mark Rubinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

Derivative assets analysis enjoys an unusual status; it is a recently developed, relatively complex tool of economic analysis, faithful to the core of economic theory, and widely used to make real-life decisions. This paper, discusses derivative assets ba...

Generalizations about Using Value-Added Measures of Teacher Quality

By Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin

American Economic Review, May 2010

Fussing and Fuming over Fannie and Freddie: How Much Smoke, How Much Fire?

By W. Scott Frame and Lawrence J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

The roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have become increasingly controversial in the modern world of residential mortgage finance. We describe the special features of these two companies and their roles in the mortgage markets. We then discuss the contro...

Tenure Issues in Higher Education

[Symposium: The Economics of Higher Education]

By Michael S. McPherson and Morton Owen Schapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

The system of academic tenure has come under increasing scrutiny. The authors provide a brief review of the tenure literature, discuss some recent tenure controversies, and present basic data on the percentage of faculty subject to the tenure system. The ...

Identity-Driven Cooperation versus Competition

By Dennis J. Snower and Steven J. Bosworth

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper seeks to extend the domain of identity economics by exploring motivational foundations of in-group cooperation and out-group competition. On this basis, we explore the reflexive interaction between individual economic decisions and social ident...

Groups Make Better Self-Interested Decisions

By Gary Charness and Matthias Sutter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

In this paper, we describe what economists have learned about differences between group and individual decision-making. This literature is still young, and in this paper, we will mostly draw on experimental work (mainly in the laboratory) that has compare...

A Model of Housing in the Presence of Adjustment Costs: A Structural Interpretation of Habit Persistence

By Marjorie Flavin and Shinobu Nakagawa

American Economic Review, March 2008

The paper provides a model of household consumption and portfolio allocation which incorporates housing as both a consumption good and a component of wealth. Household utility depends, possibly nonseparably, on two goods: nondurable consumption, which is ...

Urbanization, Mortality, and Fertility in Malthusian England

By Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins

American Economic Review, May 2009

Estimating the Effect of Student Aid on College Enrollment: Evidence from a Government Grant Policy Reform

By Helena Skyt Nielsen, Torben Sørensen, and Christopher Taber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

In this paper, we estimate the response of college enrollment to changes in student aid arising from a Danish reform. We separately identify the effect of aid from that of other observed and unobserved variables such as parental income. We exploit the com...

Valuing New Goods in a Model with Complementarity: Online Newspapers

By Matthew Gentzkow

American Economic Review, June 2007

Many important economic questions hinge on the extent to which new goods either crowd out or complement consumption of existing products. Recent methods for studying new goods rule out complementarity by assumption, so their applicability to these ques...