Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Trade-Offs

By Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz, and Tommaso Valletti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers...

Making Case-Based Decision Theory Directly Observable

By Han Bleichrodt, Martin Filko, Amit Kothiyal, and Peter P. Wakker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

Case-based decision theory (CBDT) provided a new way of revealing preferences, with decisions under uncertainty determined by similarities with cases in memory. This paper introduces a method to measure CBDT that requires no commitment to parametric famil...

A Nation of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation and American History

By Edward L. Glaeser

American Economic Review, May 2013

The great housing convulsion that buffeted America between 2000 and 2010 has historical precedents, from the frontier land boom of the 1790s to the skyscraper craze of the 1920s. But this time was different. There was far less real uncertainty about funda...

Manipulability of Stable Mechanisms

By Peter Chen, Michael Egesdal, Marek Pycia, and M. Bumin Yenmez

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

We study the manipulability of stable matching mechanisms and show that manipulability comparisons are equivalent to preference comparisons: for any agent, a mechanism is more manipulable than another if and only if this agent prefers the latter to the...

Place Based Policies with Unemployment

By Patrick Kline and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2013

We develop a stylized model of frictional local labor markets with the goal of studying the efficiency of unemployment differences across areas. The model adapts the widely used Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides framework to a local labor market setting with a...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

Term Premia and Inflation Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from an International Panel Dataset

By Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Review, June 2011

This paper provides cross-country empirical evidence on term premia. I construct a panel of zero-coupon nominal government bond yields spanning ten industrialized countries and nearly two decades. I hence compute forward rates and use two different method...

The Ethics of Incentivizing the Uninformed: A Vignette Study

By Sandro Ambuehl and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, May 2017

Our recent working paper (Ambuehl, Ockenfels, and Stewart 2017) shows theoretically and experimentally that people with higher costs of information processing respond more to an increase in the incentive for a complex transaction, and decide to participat...

Using Internet Data for Economic Research

By Benjamin Edelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

The data used by economists can be broadly divided into two categories. First, structured datasets arise when a government agency, trade association, or company can justify the expense of assembling records. The Internet has transformed how economists int...

Mindless Eating and Healthy Heuristics for the Irrational

By Brian Wansink, David R. Just, and Collin R. Payne

American Economic Review, May 2009

Killing Me Softly: The Fetal Origins Hypothesis

By Douglas Almond and Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

In the epidemiological literature, the fetal origins hypothesis associated with David J. Barker posits that chronic, degenerative conditions of adult health, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes, may be triggered by circumstances decades earlier, p...

Optimal Sticky Prices under Rational Inattention

By Bartosz Mackowiak and Mirko Wiederholt

American Economic Review, June 2009

This paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to, subject to a constraint on information flow. When idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions, firms pay more attention...

Do Democratic Transitions Produce Bad Economic Outcomes?

By Dani Rodrik and Romain Wacziarg

American Economic Review, May 2005

Health and the Political Agency of Women

By Sonia Bhalotra and Irma Clots-Figueras

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

We investigate whether women's political representation in state legislatures improves public provision of antenatal and childhood health services in the districts from which they are elected, arguing that the costs of poor services in this domain fall...

Peer Effects, Teacher Incentives, and the Impact of Tracking: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya

By Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, August 2011

To the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones. However, all students may benefit if tracking allows teachers to better tailor their instruction level. Lower-achieving pupils are partic...

Pride and Prejudice: The Human Side of Incentive Theory

By Tore Ellingsen and Magnus Johannesson

American Economic Review, June 2008

Desire for social esteem is a source of prosocial behavior. We develop a model in which actors' utility of esteem depends on the audience. In a principal agent setting, we show that the model can account for motivational crowding out. Control systems a...

Retrospectives: The Law of Diminishing Returns

By Stanley L. Brue

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

From introductory economics to theoretical papers, the law of diminishing returns is a part of every economist's tool kit. But the evolution of this law in the history of economic analysis reveals more complexity than is perhaps generally understood. Even...

Coping with Terms-of-Trade Shocks: Pegs versus Floats

By Christian Broda

American Economic Review, May 2001

Consumption Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Orazio P. Attanasio and Luigi Pistaferri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this essay, we discuss the importance of consumption inequality in the debate concerning the measurement of disparities in economic well-being. We summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using consumption as opposed to income for measuring trends...