Exclusive Contracts, Innovation, and Welfare

By Yongmin Chen and David E. M. Sappington

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

We extend Philippe Aghion and Patrick Bolton's (1987) classic model to analyze the equilibrium incidence and impact of exclusive contracts in a setting where research and development (R&D) drives industry performance. An exclusive contract between an incu...

Social Reinforcement: Cascades, Entrapment, and Tipping

By Geoffrey Heal and Howard Kunreuther

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as (Harvey) Leibenstein's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differe...

Intrahousehold Allocation of Free and Purchased Mosquito Nets

By Vivian Hoffmann

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Housing Market Impacts of Shale Gas Development: Corrigendum

By Lucija Muehlenbachs, Elisheba Spiller, and Christopher Timmins

American Economic Review, February 2016

Truthful Revelation Mechanisms for Simultaneous Common Agency Games

By Alessandro Pavan and Giacomo Calzolari

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

We introduce new revelation mechanisms for simultaneous common agency games which, although they do not always permit a complete equilibrium characterization, do facilitate the characterization of the equilibrium outcomes that are typically of interest in...

A Model-Based Evaluation of the Debate on the Size of the Tax Multiplier

By Ryan Chahrour, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, and Martín Uribe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

The SVAR and narrative approaches to estimating tax multipliers deliver significantly different results. The former yields multipliers of about 1 and the latter of about 3. The two approaches differ along two important dimensions: the identification schem...

Anti-Poverty Policy for Families in the Next Century: From Welfare to Work--and Worries

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of the Economy]

By David T. Ellwood

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

This paper reveals that recent changes in social policy have included both sharp cutbacks in welfare for non-working families and dramatic increases in supports for low income working families. It explores the reasons for these changes, and documents how ...

Optimal Intermediary Rents

By Josef Schroth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2016

This paper studies a dynamic production economy with financial intermediation. It is assumed that claims held on intermediaries cannot be fully enforced such that intermediation is subject to intermediary equity requirements. It is shown that competitive ...

Behind the GATE Experiment: Evidence on Effects of and Rationales for Subsidized Entrepreneurship Training

By Robert W. Fairlie, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States...

Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting: Philadelphia, PA, January 4, 2014

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2014

Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?

By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

American Economic Review, May 2013

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, further rises in income are not associated with further increases in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of r...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

Seeking the Roots of Entrepreneurship: Insights from Behavioral Economics

[Symposium: Entrepreneurship]

By Thomas Astebro, Holger Herz, Ramana Nanda, and Roberto A. Weber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral...

Policy Watch: Government Analysis of the Benefits and Costs of Regulation

By Robert W. Hahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Recently, Congress has shown a greater interest in assessing the economic impact of regulation. This interest was driven in part by estimates that federal regulation costs several hundred billion dollars annually. In 1996, Congress required the director o...

Modernizing China's Growth Paradigm

By Eswar S. Prasad and Raghuram G. Rajan

American Economic Review, May 2006

Trade and Carbon Taxes

By Joshua Elliott, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Todd Munson, Fernando Pérez Cervantes, and David Weisbach

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Market Evaluation of Criminality: Evidence from the Auction of British Convict Labor in America, 1767-1775

By Farley Grubb

American Economic Review, March 2001

Land and Racial Wealth Inequality

By Melinda C. Miller

American Economic Review, May 2011

Could racial wealth inequality have been reduced if freed slaves had been granted land following the Civil War? This paper exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in policies of the Cherokee Nation and southern United States to identify the impact of fre...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Retrospectives: Animal Spirits

By Roger Koppl

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

John Maynard Keynes argued that when the conditions for rational action are not present, people are driven by "animal spirits." This article briefly considers Keynes' argument, and the history of the term.