Managing Local Commons: Theoretical Issues in Incentive Design

[Symposium]

By Paul Seabright

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

Local commons encompass a wide range of resources whose shared feature is the need for some form of collective management. In what follows, we shall be concerned mainly with the problems of implementing a collective management plan. Whatever the mechanism...

Option Awareness: The Psychology of What We Consider

By Anuj K. Shah and Jens Ludwig

American Economic Review, May 2016

The standard economic view suggests that people will commit an action if its expected benefits outweigh its costs. But before people weigh the costs and benefits of an action, what affects whether they think of the action in the first place? We argue that...

Network Structure and the Aggregation of Information: Theory and Evidence from Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review, July 2016

We use unique data from over 600 Indonesian communities on what individuals know about the poverty status of others to study how network structure influences information aggregation. We develop a model of semi-Bayesian learning on networks, which we struc...

Self-Enforcing Contracts, Shirking, and Life Cycle Incentives

[Symposium: Seniority and Wages]

By H. Lorne Carmichael

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

The labor market is a rich and complicated place. When a worker takes a job he expects to earn a wage, but will also care about rates of wage growth, fringe benefits, levels of risk, retirement practices, pensions, promotion and layoff rules, seniority ri...

Civil War

By Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. Yet while civil war is central to many nations' development, it has stood at the periphery of economics research and teaching. The past decade has witnessed a long overdue explosion o...

Will the New Keynesian Macroeconomics Resurrect the IS-LM Model?

[Symposium: Keynesian Economics Today]

By Robert G. King

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

The IS-LM model has no greater prospect of being a viable analytical vehicle for macroeconomics in the 1990s than the Ford Pinto has of being a sporty, reliable car for the 1990s. Because of its treatment of expectations, the IS-LM model, as traditionally...

Measuring Investment in Education

[Symposium: Primary and Secondary Education]

By Eric A. Hanushek

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

Historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital. As extensive research demonstrates, education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and ...

Uncertainty at the Zero Lower Bound

By Taisuke Nakata

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

When the policy rate is at the zero lower bound (ZLB), an increase in uncertainty regarding the future path of exogenous shocks alters the conditional expectations of relevant prices facing households and firms. Accordingly, an increase in uncertainty alt...

Uncertainty and the Dynamics of R&D

By Nick Bloom

American Economic Review, May 2007

Group Polarization in a Model of Information Aggregation

By Nicolas Roux and Joel Sobel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

Experiments identify the empirical regularity that groups tend to make decisions that are more extreme, but in the same direction as the tendency of individual members of the group. We present a model of information aggregation consistent with these findi...

Economic Shocks and Conflict: Evidence from Commodity Prices

By Samuel Bazzi and Christopher Blattman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

Higher national incomes are correlated with political stability. Is this relationship causal? We test three theories linking income to conflict with new data on export price shocks. Price shocks have no effect on new conflict, even large shocks in high...

Rankings of U.S. Economics Departments

By Richard Dusansky and Clayton J. Vernon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

Economics departments in the United States are ranked using the criterion of publication in a set of eight leading journals. The publication period is 1990-94 inclusive, and faculty assignments to departments are for fall semester 1995. The ranking is com...

Superstition and Rational Learning

By Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine

American Economic Review, June 2006

We argue that some, but not all, superstitions can persist when learning is rational and players are patient, and illustrate our argument with an example inspired by the Code of Hammurabi. The code specified an "appeal by surviving in the river" as a w...

The Redesign of the Matching Market for American Physicians: Some Engineering Aspects of Economic Design

By Alvin E. Roth and Elliott Peranson

American Economic Review, September 1999

We report on the design of the new clearinghouse adopted by the National Resident Matching Program, which annually fills approximately 20,000 jobs for new physicians. Because the market has complementarities between applicants and between positions, the t...

Over the Cliff: From the Subprime to the Global Financial Crisis

[Symposium: Financial Regulation after the Crisis]

By Frederic S. Mishkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 can be divided into two distinct phases. The first and more limited phase from August 2007 to August 2008 stemmed from losses in one relatively small segment of the U.S. financial system—namely, subprime resident...

Review of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism by Christine Desan

By William Roberds

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

In the eighteenth century, the Bank of England revolutionized money through its large-scale introduction of circulating banknotes. The consequences of this revolution are felt even today. In Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism

Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments: Reply

By Dirk Engelmann and Martin Strobel

American Economic Review, December 2006

Esther Duflo: 2010 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Christopher Udry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

Esther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraordinary contributions to development economics. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the renaissance of development economics over the past decade. She has erected and inspi...

Some Fiscal Calculus

By Harald Uhlig

American Economic Review, May 2010

Retrospectives: From Usury to Interest

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

Since the Middle Ages, each epoch has participated in the debate over the conditions in which lending should be prohibited as usury. While disagreements over the definition of usury remain, the debate came to its modern climax on the eve of the industrial...