A Change Would Do You Good .... An Experimental Study on How to Overcome Coordination Failure in Organizations

By Jordi Brandts and David J. Cooper

American Economic Review, June 2006

We study how financial incentives can be used to overcome a history of coordination failure using controlled laboratory experiments. Subjects' payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels. In an initial phase, the benefits of coordination are l...

Completing China's Move to the Market

[Symposium: China]

By Dwight H. Perkins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

Beginning in late 1978, by luck as much as design, China arrived at a strategy for market-oriented economic reform that combined substantial reform with rapid growth in GDP and exports. The sequencing of reform began with the 'easy to reform' sectors, agr...

Personal Retirement Accounts and Saving

By Emma Aguila

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

Aging populations are leading countries worldwide to social security reforms. Many countries are moving from pay-as-you-go to personal retirement account (PRA) systems because of their financial sustainability and positive impact on private savings. PRA s...

Was the Monetarist Tradition Invented?

By George S. Tavlas

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

In 1969, Harry Johnson charged that Milton Friedman 'invented' a Chicago oral quantity theory tradition, the idea being that in order to launch a monetarist counter-revolution, Friedman needed to establish a linkage with pre-Keynesian orthodoxy. This pape...

Loss Aversion in Post-Sale Purchases of Consumer Products and Their Substitutes

By Debajyoti Ray, Matthew Shum, and Colin F. Camerer

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper considers the measurement of consumer loss aversion in product markets. We introduce a test based on a "substitution effect," focusing on how the end of a sale affects sales not of the good itself, but a substitute good. Such an effect cannot b...

The Bank of Amsterdam and the Leap to Central Bank Money

By Stephen Quinn and William Roberds

American Economic Review, May 2007

Competitive Framing

By Ran Spiegler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2014

I present a simple framework for modeling two-firm market competition when consumer choice is "frame-dependent", and firms use costless "marketing messages" to influence the consumer's frame. This framework embeds several recent models in the "behavioral ...

A Theory of Brain Drain and Public Funding for Higher Education in the United States

By Felicia Ionescu and Linnea A. Polgreen

American Economic Review, May 2009

Public Education Expenditures, Taxation, and Growth: Linking Data to Theory

By William F. Blankenau, Nicole B. Simpson, and Marc Tomljanovich

American Economic Review, May 2007

Decision–Making Procedures for Committees of Careerist Experts

By Gilat Levy

American Economic Review, May 2007

Optimal Voting Rules

[Symposium: Economics of Voting]

By Peyton Young

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1995

Modern social choice theory, following Kenneth Arrow, treats voting as a method for aggregating diverse preferences and values. An earlier view, initiated by Marquis de Condorcet, is that voting is a method for aggregating information. Voters' opinions di...

The Great Recession and Credit Trends across Income Groups

By Gene Amromin and Leslie McGranahan

American Economic Review, May 2015

In this paper, we document trends in credit use across income groups in the period surrounding the Great Recession. We investigate trends in access to different credit markets, including mortgages, home equity, automobiles, and student loans. We disentang...

The Limitations of Legal Institutions for Addressing Environmental Risks

[Symposium: The Economics of Liability]

By Peter S. Menell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

This article assesses the major systems of environmental liability in the United States—the toxic tort system and Superfund. The discussion of each of these areas first lays out the scientific background of the environmental problems and the applica...

From Stagnation to Sustained Growth: The Role of Female Empowerment

By Claude Diebolt and Faustine Perrin

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper explores the role of gender equality over a long-run economic and demographic development path of industrialized countries. Our unified cliometric growth model of female empowerment suggests that changes in gender relations are a key ingredient...

Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Mutual Fund Asset Allocation Changes

By Clemens Sialm, Laura Starks, and Hanjiang Zhang

American Economic Review, May 2015

In this paper we compare changes in asset allocations between mutual funds held in defined contribution pension plans and funds held by other investors. We investigate how flows into equity and fixed income mutual funds depend on macroeconomic conditions....

The Coordination Value of Monetary Exchange: Experimental Evidence

By Gabriele Camera and Marco Casari

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

What institutions can sustain cooperation in groups of strangers? Here we study the role of monetary systems. In an experiment, subjects sometimes needed help and sometimes could incur a cost to help an anonymous counterpart. In the absence of money, the...

Asset Fire Sales and Credit Easing

By Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny

American Economic Review, May 2010

How Do Budget Deficits and Economic Growth Affect Reelection Prospects? Evidence from a Large Panel of Countries

By Adi Brender and Allan Drazen

American Economic Review, December 2008

We test whether good economic conditions and expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get reelected in a large panel of democracies. We find no evidence that deficits help reelection in any group of countries independent of income level, level of democr...

Trade in Intermediate Inputs and Business Cycle Comovement

By Robert C. Johnson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

Does input trade synchronize business cycles across countries? I incorporate input trade into a dynamic multisector model with many countries, calibrate the model to match bilateral input-output data, and estimate trade-comovement regressions in simula...

Dynamic Pricing of Electricity

By Paul L. Joskow and Catherine D. Wolfram

American Economic Review, May 2012

As both a regulator and an academic, Fred Kahn argued that end-use electricity consumers should face prices that reflect the time-varying marginal costs of generating electricity. This has been very slow to happen in the US, even in light of recent techno...