Anomalies: The Winner's Curse

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

Next time that you find yourself a little short of cash for lunch, try the following experiment in your class. Take a jar and fill it with coins, noting the total value of the coins. Now auction off the jar to your class (offering to pay the winning bidde...

College on the Cheap: Consequences of Community College Tuition Reductions

By Jeffrey T. Denning

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This paper examines the effects of community college tuition on college enrollment. I exploit quasi-experimental variation from discounts for community college tuition in Texas that were expanded over time and across geography for identification. Communit...

Business Cycles in International Historical Perspective

[Symposium: Business Cycles]

By Susanto Basu and Alan M. Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

This paper examines business cycles theoretically and empirically, with a quantitative study based on data for a cross section of countries. Theoretical concerns indicate that the properties of business cycle models depend not only on important structural...

Monetary Policy Rules and Macroeconomic Stability: Some New Evidence

By Sophocles Mavroeidis

American Economic Review, March 2010

I revisit the question of indeterminacy in US monetary policy using limited-information identification-robust methods. I find that the conclusions of Clarida, Galí, and Gernter (2000) that policy was inactive before 1979 are robust, but the evidenc...

Risk Preferences Are Not Time Preferences: Reply

By James Andreoni and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Review, July 2015

Can the well-known experimental phenomenon of present-bias in intertemporal choice be confounded with the risks associated with receiving payment? Can measurements of risk preferences be used to represent desires for smoothness in intertemporal payments? ...

Executive Compensation as an Agency Problem

[Symposium: Stock Options]

By Lucian Arye Bebchuk and Jesse M. Fried

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Executive compensation has long attracted a great deal of attention from financial economists. Indeed, the increase in academic papers on the subject of CEO compensation during the 1990s seems to have outpaced even the remarkable increase in CEO pay itsel...

The Measurement of Student Ability in Modern Assessment Systems

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Brian Jacob and Jesse Rothstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Economists often use test scores to measure a student’s performance or an adult’s human capital. These scores reflect nontrivial decisions about how to measure and scale student achievement, with important implications for secondary analyses. For exam...

The Economics of Climate Change

By Nicholas Stern

American Economic Review, May 2008

Self-Fulfilling Currency Crises: The Role of Interest Rates

By Christian Hellwig, Arijit Mukherji, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, December 2006

We develop a model of currency crises, in which traders are heterogeneously informed, and interest rates are endogenously determined in a noisy rational expectations equilibrium. In our model, multiple equilibria result from distinct roles an interest ...

The Trade Effects of Endogenous Preferential Trade Agreements

By Peter Egger, Mario Larch, Kevin E. Staub, and Rainer Winkelmann

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Structural new trade theory models have never been used to evaluate and quantify the role of preferential trade agreement (PTA) membership for trade in a way which is consistent with general equilibrium. Apart from filling this gap, the present paper aims...

Investment in Schooling and the Marriage Market

By Pierre-André Chiappori, Murat Iyigun, and Yoram Weiss

American Economic Review, December 2009

We present a model in which investment in schooling generates two kinds of returns: the labor-market return, resulting from higher wages, and a marriage-market return, defined as the impact of schooling on the marital surplus share one can extract. Men...

An International Look at the Growth of Modern Finance

[Symposium: The Growth of the Financial Sector]

By Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013

We study the rise of finance across a set of now-industrial economies. The long-run pattern of the growth of the income share of finance from the nineteenth century to current times in the United States is similar to some economies, but not all economies ...

Correspondence & Response [Econometrics and Presidential Elections].

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

Financial Intermediation and Macroeconomic Analysis

[Symposium: Macroeconomics after the Financial Crisis]

By Michael Woodford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

Understanding phenomena such as the recent financial crisis, and possible policy responses, requires the use of a macroeconomic framework in which financial intermediation matters for the allocation of resources. Neither standard macroeconomic models that...

Trading in Networks: A Normal Form Game Experiment

By Douglas M. Gale and Shachar Kariv

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

This paper reports an experimental study of trading networks. Networks are incomplete in the sense that each trader can only exchange assets with a limited number of other traders. The greater the incompleteness of the network, the more intermediation ...

Collusion with Asymmetric Retailers: Evidence from a Gasoline Price-Fixing Case

By Robert Clark and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

We point out a fundamental difficulty of successfully colluding in retail markets with heterogeneous firms, and characterize the mechanism recent gasoline cartels in Canada used to sustain collusion. Heterogeneity in cost and network size necessitates...

Information Disclosure and Unraveling in Matching Markets

By Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets. A school may suppress some information about students in order to improve their average job placement. We consider a setting with many schools, students, and jobs, and show that if early cont...

An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Gap in Mathematics

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We document and analyze the emergence of a substantial gender gap in mathematics in the early years of schooling using a large, recent, and nationally representative panel of US children. There are no mean differences between boys and girls upon entry ...

Metals or Management? Explaining Africa's Recent Economic Growth Performance

By Laura N. Beny and Lisa D. Cook

American Economic Review, May 2009

Optimal Expectations and Limited Medical Testing: Evidence from Huntington Disease: Corrigendum

By Emily Oster, Ira Shoulson, and E. Ray Dorsey

American Economic Review, June 2016