Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture

By H. Peyton Young and Mary A. Burke

American Economic Review, June 2001

Survey data suggest that cropsharing contracts exhibit a much higher degree of uniformity than is warranted by economic fundamentals. We propose a dynamic model of contract choice to explain this phenomenon. Landowners and tenants recontract periodically,...

Puzzles: Cider in Your Ear, Continuing Dilemma, The Last Shall be First, More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

In presenting economic puzzles, I have three goals in mind: some puzzles are chosen to stimulate research; others offer examples that will help undergraduate and graduate teaching; all should provide quality distractions during seminars. As usual, this fe...

Stochastic Technical Progress, Smooth Trends, and Nearly Distinct Business Cycles

By Julio J. Rotemberg

American Economic Review, December 2003

This paper studies a model of random technical progress where technology diffuses at realistically slow rates. It fits smooth trends to the sum of GDP series generated by this model and series representing transitory, or cyclical, fluctuations. Detrended ...

Pervasive Stickiness

By N. Gregory Mankiw and Ricardo Reis

American Economic Review, May 2006

Report of the Treasurer

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2015

Data Watch: The World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study Household Surveys

By Margaret E. Grosh and Paul Glewwe

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

Since 1985, the World Bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare, understanding household behavior, and evaluating the impact of government policies. Thi...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

Submission Fees and Response Times in Academic Publishing

By Christopher Cotton

American Economic Review, February 2013

Both submission fees and response times enable editors to maintain an acceptable refereeing burden by discouraging the submission of articles with low probability of acceptance. When authors differ in their ability or willingness to pay submission fees an...

Elections, Capital Flows, and Politico-economic Equilibria

By Roberto Chang

American Economic Review, September 2010

We study an open economy where a pro-labor and a pro-business candidate compete in an election. The winner chooses taxes, which affect investment returns. Electoral outcomes depend on the size of the foreign debt, but the debt itself reflects expectations...

A Quantitative Theory of Information and Unsecured Credit

By Kartik Athreya, Xuan S. Tam, and Eric R. Young

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

Important changes have occurred in unsecured credit markets over the past three decades. Most prominently, there have been large increases in aggregate consumer debt, the personal bankruptcy rate, the size of bankruptcies, the dispersion of interest rates...

Transaction Networks: Evidence from Mobile Money in Kenya

By William Jack, Adam Ray, and Tavneet Suri

American Economic Review, May 2013

Mobile money allows households in Kenya to spread risk more efficiently. In this paper we show that these efficiencies are achieved through deeper financial integration and expanded informal networks. Active networks are more geographically dispersed and ...

In Honor of Nobel Laureate, Franco Modigliani

By Robert C. Merton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

When Gary Becker asked me to introduce Franco Modigliani on this occasion celebrating Franco's Nobel Prize, he noted that, by tradition, the honoree does not speak. It is the introducer who speaks, devoting 30 minutes or so to the laureate's chief contrib...

Partnerships versus Corporations: Moral Hazard, Sorting, and Ownership Structure

By Ayca Kaya and Galina Vereshchagina

American Economic Review, January 2014

Team production takes advantage of technological complementarities but comes with the cost of free-ridership. When workers differ in skills, the choice of sorting pattern may be associated with a nontrivial trade-off between exploiting the technologica...

Returning to the Returns to Computer Use

By Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Cindy Zoghi

American Economic Review, May 2005

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

Nineteenth-Century American Feminist Economics: From Caroline Dall to Charlotte Perkins Gilman

By Robert W. Dimand

American Economic Review, May 2000

Coalition Formation in a Legislative Voting Game

By Nels Christiansen, Sotiris Georganas, and John H. Kagel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

We experimentally investigate the Jackson and Moselle (2002) model where legislators bargain over policy proposals and the allocation of private goods. Key comparative static predictions of the model hold with the introduction of private goods, including...

On the Simple Economics of Advertising, Marketing, and Product Design

By Justin P. Johnson and David P. Myatt

American Economic Review, June 2006

We propose a framework for analyzing transformations of demand. Such transformations frequently stem from changes in the dispersion of consumers' valuations, which lead to rotations of the demand curve. In many settings, profits are a U-shaped function...

Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession 2010

By Barbara M. Fraumeni

American Economic Review, May 2011

Bounding the Labor Supply Responses to a Randomized Welfare Experiment: A Revealed Preference Approach

By Patrick Kline and Melissa Tartari

American Economic Review, April 2016

We study the short-term impact of Connecticut's Jobs First welfare reform experiment on women's labor supply and welfare participation decisions. A nonparametric optimizing model is shown to restrict the set of counterfactual choices compatible with ea...