An Economist's Guide to U.S. v. Microsoft

[Symposium: The Microsoft Case]

By Richard J. Gilbert and Michael L. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

We analyze the central economic issues raised by U.S. v Microsoft. Network effects and economies of scale in applications programs created a barrier to entry for new operating system competitors, which the combination of Netscape Navigator and the Java pr...

Resisting Moral Wiggle Room: How Robust Is Reciprocal Behavior?

By Joël J. van der Weele, Julija Kulisa, Michael Kosfeld, and Guido Friebel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2014

We provide the second mover in a trust game and a moonlighting game with an excuse for not reciprocating. While this type of manipulation has been shown to strongly reduce giving in the dictator game, we find that the availability of the excuse has no eff...

L₂-Boosting for Economic Applications

By Ye Luo and Martin Spindler

American Economic Review, May 2017

We present the L2-Boosting algorithm and two variants, namely post-Boosting and orthogonal Boosting. Building on results in Ye and Spindler (2016), we demonstrate how boosting can be used for estimation and inference of low-dimensional t...

Why Is Housing Finance Still Stuck in Such a Primitive Stage?

By Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, May 2014

The institutions for financing owner-occupied housing have not progressed as they should, and the financial innovation that has followed the financial crisis of 2007-2009 has not been focused on improving the risk management of individual homeowners. This...

Long Run Risks, the Macroeconomy, and Asset Prices

By Ravi Bansal, Dana Kiku, and Amir Yaron

American Economic Review, May 2010

Applicant Screening and Performance-Related Outcomes

By Fali Huang and Peter Cappelli

American Economic Review, May 2010

Elephants: Comment

By Erwin H. Bulte, Richard D. Horan, and Jason F. Shogren

American Economic Review, September 2003

Optimal Incentives for Teams: Comment

By Shingo Ishiguro

American Economic Review, December 2002

E-lections: Voting Behavior and the Internet

By Oliver Falck, Robert Gold, and Stephan Heblich

American Economic Review, July 2014

This paper analyzes the effects on voting behavior of information disseminated over the Internet. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hinder...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

The Principal-Agent Approach to Testing Experts

By Wojciech Olszewski and Marcin Pęski

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

Recent literature on testing experts shows that it is often impossible to determine whether an expert knows the stochastic process that generates data. Despite this negative result, we show that there often exist contracts that allow a decision maker to a...

Do Labor Market Rigidities Have Microeconomic Effects? Evidence from within the Firm

By Francine Lafontaine and Jagadeesh Sivadasan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We exploit a unique outlet-level dataset from a multinational chain with over 2,500 outlets in 43 countries to investigate the effects of labor regulations that protect employment. The dataset contains information on output, materials, and labor costs ...

Community Structure and Market Outcomes: A Repeated Games-in-Networks Approach

By Itay P. Fainmesser

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2012

Consider a large market with asymmetric information, in which sellers have the option to "cheat" their buyers, and buyers decide whether to repurchase from different sellers. We model active trade relationships as links in a buyer-seller network and study...

Retrospectives: The Convergence Debate between David Hume and Josiah Tucker

By Bruce Truitt Elmslie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

One of the most interesting debates in modern economics centers around the question of whether integrating economies necessarily converge in terms of per capita income and technology. This debate is often believed to have been started by Thorstein Veblen ...

What Do High-Interest Borrowers Do with Their Tax Rebate?

By Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse

American Economic Review, May 2009

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Is American Pet Health Care (Also) Uniquely Inefficient?

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Atul Gupta

American Economic Review, May 2017

We document four similarities between American human healthcare and American pet care: (i) rapid growth in spending as a share of GDP over the last two decades; (ii) strong income-spending gradient; (iii) rapid growth in the employment of healthcare provi...

Policy Analysis in Matching Markets

By Nikhil Agarwal

American Economic Review, May 2017

Price and quantity interventions intended to affect assignments are common in many labor and education markets (e.g., financial aid, quotas). This article discusses an empirical framework, based on the theory of stable matching, that is suitable for polic...

Social Security Investment in Equities

By Peter Diamond and John Geanakoplos

American Economic Review, September 2003

This paper explores the general-equilibrium impact of social security portfolio diversification into private securities, either through the trust fund or private accounts. The analysis depends critically on heterogeneities in saving, production, assets, a...

Interactions of Commitment and Discretion in Monetary and Fiscal Policies

By Avinash Dixit and Luisa Lambertini

American Economic Review, December 2003

We consider monetary-fiscal interactions when the monetary authority is more conservative than the fiscal. With both policies discretionary, (1) Nash equilibrium yields lower output and higher price than the ideal points of both authorities, (2) of the tw...