Risk Sharing Across Communities

By Yann Bramoullé and Rachel Kranton

American Economic Review, May 2007

Reallocation Costs and Efficiency

By Yuval Salant and Ron Siegel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

We study the efficient allocation of a divisible asset when reallocation is costly. Two players initially divide an asset between them. At the time of this initial division the players' valuations for the asset are uncertain. After the uncertainty resolve...

Consumer Search and Double Marginalization

By Maarten Janssen and Sandro Shelegia

American Economic Review, June 2015

The well-known double marginalization problem understates the inefficiencies arising from vertical relations in consumer search markets where consumers are uninformed about the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers to retailers. Consumer search provid...

Living Arrangements, Doubling Up, and the Great Recession: Was This Time Different?

By Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes

American Economic Review, May 2015

The Great Recession marks the worst downturn since those of the early 1980s. A large literature considers how the public safety net responded to this shock. We instead consider the responsiveness of one dimension of the private safety net. Families can re...

Nonprofit Organizations in the Health Sector

By Richard G. Frank and David S. Salkever

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Government appears to both promote and mistrust nonprofit organizations in the health sector. Tax exemptions, subsidies, and preferential treatment in contracts support these organizations. Legislation that links the supply of charity care to tax exemptio...

Whither Russia? A Review of Andrei Shleifer's A Normal Country

By Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2007

In this review, the author reflects on the heated debates around views about Russia's postcommunist transition expressed in essays collected in new Andrei Shleifer's book, A Normal Country: Russia after Communism (Harvard University Press, 2005), ...

The Role of Proximity in Foreclosure Externalities: Evidence from Condominiums

By Lynn M. Fisher, Lauren Lambie-Hanson, and Paul Willen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We measure the effect of foreclosures on the sale prices of nearby properties using a dataset of condominiums in Boston. A foreclosure in the same association and at the same address depresses the sale price by 2.5 percent, but properties in the same asso...

The Economic Transition of Czechoslovakia from Plan to Market

By Josef C. Brada

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

The Communist government of Czechoslovakia was ousted in the so-called Velvet Revolution of November 1989, and the new regime adopted as its goal the transformation of the economy to one based on markets and private property, and also one more dynamic and...

Trading Favors within Chinese Business Groups

By Raymond Fisman and Yongxiang Wang

American Economic Review, May 2010

A Theory of Optimal Random Crackdowns

By Jan Eeckhout, Nicola Persico, and Petra E. Todd

American Economic Review, June 2010

An incentives based theory of policing is developed which can explain the phenomenon of random "crackdowns," i.e., intermittent periods of high interdiction/ surveillance. For a variety of police objective functions, random crackdowns can be part of the...

Neuroeconomic Foundations of Trust and Social Preferences: Initial Evidence

By Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, and Michael Kosfeld

American Economic Review, May 2005

Risk-Sensitive Consumption and Savings under Rational Inattention

By Yulei Luo and Eric R. Young

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

This paper studies the consumption-savings behavior of households who have risk-sensitive preferences and suffer from limited information-processing capacity (rational inattention or RI). We first solve the model explicitly and show that RI increases prec...

Industrial Policy in an Export-Propelled Economy: Lessons from South Korea's Experience

[Symposium: The State and Economic Development]

By Larry E. Westphal

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

Korea provides an illuminating case of state intervention to promote economic development. Like many other third world governments, Korea's government has selectively intervened to affect the allocation of resources among industrial activities. It has use...

Weak Identification in Maximum Likelihood: A Question of Information

By Isaiah Andrews and Anna Mikusheva

American Economic Review, May 2014

In this paper we connect the discrepancy between two estimates of Fisher information, one based on the quadratic variation of the score and the other based on the negative Hessian of the log-likelihood, to weak identification. Classical asymptotic approxi...

Empirical Strategies in Contract Economics: Information and the Boundary of the Firm

By George Baker and Thomas N. Hubbard

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Interest Rate, Learning, and Inventory Investment

By Louis J. Maccini, Bartholomew J. Moore, and Huntley Schaller

American Economic Review, December 2004

This paper presents a model that provides an explanation, based on regime switching in the real interest rate and learning, of why tests based on stock adjustment models, Euler equations, or decision rules—which emphasize short-run fluctuations in inven...

Average Earnings and Long-Term Mortality: Evidence from Administrative Data

By Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter

American Economic Review, May 2009

Property Rights to Technical Knowledge in Premodern Europe, 1300 -1800

By Stephan R. Epstein

American Economic Review, May 2004

Institutions and Democratic Invention in 19th-Century America: Evidence from "Great Inventors," 1790-1930

By Zorina Khan and Kenneth L. Sokoloff

American Economic Review, May 2004

Design Choices in Privatized Social-Security Systems: Learning from the Swedish Experience

By Henrik Cronqvist and Richard H. Thaler

American Economic Review, May 2004