Some Basic Economics of National Security

By Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel

American Economic Review, May 2013

We define national security (NS) as public policies that protect the safety or welfare of a nation's citizens from substantial threats. NS capital provides societal insurance against widespread harm or catastrophe, so optimal NS investments may have very ...

The Illusory Effects of Saving Incentives on Saving

[Symposium: Government Incentives for Saving]

By Eric M. Engen, William G. Gale, and John Karl Scholz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

The authors evaluate research on how tax-based saving incentives (IRAs and 401(k)s) affect saving. Previous research overstates the impact of the incentives on saving by failing to account for several issues: households with saving incentives have stronge...

Issues Every Plan to Reform Health Care Financing Must Confront

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

This paper focuses on three main issues of fundamental health care reform. First, should experience rating--the linkage of premiums to actual loss experience--be retained? Despite widespread support for experience rating among economists, the paper argues...

Minutes of the Annual Meeting: San Francisco, CA, January 4, 2009

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2009

Fast-Track Authority and International Trade Negotiations

By Paola Conconi, Giovanni Facchini, and Maurizio Zanardi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

We develop a simple model of trade relations in which legislators with different stakes in import-competing and export industries decide whether to grant fast-track authority (FTA) to the president, giving up the power to amend international trade agreeme...

Risk Sharing and Network Formation

By Marcel Fafchamps and Flore Gubert

American Economic Review, May 2007

A "Dual Self" Representation for Stochastic Temptation

By Kalyan Chatterjee and R. Vijay Krishna

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

We consider the following two-period problem of self-control. In the first period, an individual has to decide on the set of feasible choices from which she will select one in the second period. In the second period, the individual might choose an alte...

On the Robustness of Anchoring Effects in WTP and WTA Experiments

By Drew Fudenberg, David K. Levine, and Zacharias Maniadis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2012

We reexamine the effects of the anchoring manipulation of Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2003) on the evaluation of common market goods and find very weak anchoring effects. We perform the same manipulation on the evaluation of binary lotteries, and fin...

Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: Denver, CO, January 6, 2011

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2011

Distinguished Fellow: Herbert Scarf's Contributions to Economics

By Kenneth J. Arrow and Timothy J. Kehoe

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

For the past thirty-five years, Herbert Scarf has made fundamental contributions in studies of inventories, the core, computation of equilibria, and integer programming. His work has simultaneously sought the most general and abstract formulations while s...

Differential Impacts of Immigrants on Native Black and White Workers

By Paul Ong and Don Mar

American Economic Review, May 2007

Estimating the Effect of Salience in Wholesale and Retail Car Markets

By Meghan R. Busse, Nicola Lacetera, Devin G. Pope, Jorge Silva-Risso, and Justin R. Sydnor

American Economic Review, May 2013

We investigate whether the first digit of an odometer reading is more salient to consumers than subsequent digits. We find that retail transaction prices and volumes of used vehicles drop discontinuously at 10,000-mile odometer thresholds, echoing effects...

Voter Preferences, Polarization, and Electoral Policies

By Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

In most variants of the Hotelling-Downs model of election, it is assumed that voters have concave utility functions. This assumption is arguably justified in issues such as economic policies, but convex utilities are perhaps more appropriate in others suc...

Time Use, Emotional Well-Being, and Unemployment: Evidence from Longitudinal Data

By Alan B. Krueger and Andreas I. Mueller

American Economic Review, May 2012

This paper provides new evidence on the time use and emotional well-being of unemployed individuals in the weeks before and after starting a new job. The major findings are: (1) time spent on home production drops sharply at the time of re-employment, eve...

Annual Income and Identity Formation among Persons of Mexican Descent

By Patrick L. Mason

American Economic Review, May 2001

Did the Tax Reform Act of 1986 Simplify Tax Matters?

[Symposium: Tax Reform Act of 1986]

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

This paper attempts to assess whether the Tax Reform Act of 1986 simplified tax matters significantly, or at all. I conclude that, despite a few scattered signs that tax-related financial planning has declined, the compliance cost of the income tax system...

Report: Committee on Economic Education

By Sam Allgood

American Economic Review, May 2013

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Jane E. Voros

American Economic Review, May 2008

Gift Exchange versus Monetary Exchange: Theory and Evidence

By John Duffy and Daniela Puzzello

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the Lagos and Wright (2005) model of monetary exchange in the laboratory. With a finite population of sufficiently patient agents, this model has a unique monetary equilibrium and a continuum of non-monetary gift exchange equilibria, some of w...

Information Aggregation and Strategic Abstention in Large Laboratory Elections

By Marco Battaglini, Rebecca B. Morton, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Review, May 2008