Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Roger Gordon

American Economic Review, May 2009

Competition and Ideological Diversity: Historical Evidence from US Newspapers

By Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, and Michael Sinkinson

American Economic Review, October 2014

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors...

Sticky Prices versus Monetary Frictions: An Estimation of Policy Trade-Offs

By S. Borağan Aruoba and Frank Schorfheide

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

We develop a two-sector monetary model with a centralized and decentralized market. Activities in the centralized market resemble those in a standard New Keynesian economy with price rigidities. In the decentralized market agents engage in bilateral excha...

The Impact of Economic Development on Democracy

[Symposium: Democracy and Development]

By Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and John D. Stephens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

Any account of the social and economic conditions of democracy must come to terms with the central finding of the cross-national statistical research: a sturdy (though not perfect) association between economic development and democracy. To tackle these qu...

The Time-Varying Volatility of Macroeconomic Fluctuations

By Alejandro Justiniano and Giorgio E. Primiceri

American Economic Review, June 2008

We investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of US macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations....

Endogenous Entry to Security-Bid Auctions

By Takeharu Sogo, Dan Bernhardt, and Tingjun Liu

American Economic Review, November 2016

We endogenize entry to a security-bid auction, where participation is costly and bidders must decide given their private valuations whether to participate. We first consider any minimum reserve security-bid of a fixed expected value that weakly exceeds th...

The Environmental Consequences of Global Reuse

By Thomas Kinnaman and Hide-Fumi Yokoo

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper summarizes a two-country model that solves for optimal tax rates to achieve efficiency in an economy with international trade in used consumer electronics. If only the developed nation can tax the disposal of e-waste, then the global Pareto Opt...

Economics Online

By Drucilla Ekwurzel and John McMillan

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2001

The internet is bringing profound changes in scholarly publishing. The American Economic Association maintains a web site (www.AEAweb.org) containing the three AEA journals, bibliographic information, links to various economics information, and various se...

On Communication and Collusion

By Yu Awaya and Vijay Krishna

American Economic Review, February 2016

We study the role of communication within a cartel. Our analysis is carried out in Stigler's (1964) model of repeated oligopoly with secret price cuts. Firms observe neither the prices nor the sales of their rivals. For a fixed discount factor, we identif...

Technological Change and Risk Adjustment: Benefit Design Incentives in Medicare Part D

By Colleen Carey

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Subsidized health insurance markets use diagnosis-based risk adjustment to induce insurers to offer an equitable benefit to individuals of varying expected cost. I demonstrate that technological change after risk adjustment calibration--new drug entry and...

The Allocation of Future Business: Dynamic Relational Contracts with Multiple Agents

By Isaiah Andrews and Daniel Barron

American Economic Review, September 2016

We consider how a firm dynamically allocates business among several suppliers to motivate them in a relational contract. The firm chooses one supplier who exerts private effort. Output is non-contractible, and each supplier observes only his own relations...

Capital Taxation under Political Constraints

By Florian Scheuer and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, August 2016

This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough coalition of citizens supports reform; thus, sustainable policies are those that will continue to attract enough politi...

The Role of Prices in Measuring the Poor's Living Standards

[Symposium: Price Variation for Households]

By Christian Broda, Ephraim Leibtag, and David E. Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

In this paper, we revisit two pieces of conventional wisdom in the current debate about poverty, paying close attention to the price data underlying these findings: that the poor pay more than households of higher income for the goods and services they pu...

Early Retirement Incentives and Student Achievement

By Maria D. Fitzpatrick and Michael F. Lovenheim

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are ...

A Nobel Prize for Game Theorists: The Contributions of Harsanyi, Nash and Selten

By Faruk Gul

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

The purpose of this essay is to celebrate the contributions of John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash, and Reinhard Selten to economics. The emphasis is on tracing the influence of their work on economic analysis rather than giving a detailed account of each of t...

Understanding the Great Recession

By Lawrence J. Christiano, Martin S. Eichenbaum, and Mathias Trabandt

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2015

We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions. We reach this conclusion by looking through the lens of an estimated New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate ...

Economic Liberalization and Indian Economic Growth: What's the Evidence?

By Ashok Kotwal, Bharat Ramaswami, and Wilima Wadhwa

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2011

India's growth and poverty performance over the last three decades has been a subject of great curiosity. Unlike the East Asian countries, India's growth spurt is not associated with exceptionally high domestic savings or foreign capital inflows or manufa...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

Do the Effects of Temporary Ethnic Group Quotas Persist? Evidence from India

By Rikhil R. Bhavnani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Do electoral quotas for ethnic groups continue to improve their chances of winning elections after quotas are withdrawn? This is an important question since ethnic group quotas are common, and are often intended to be temporary. Using natural experiments,...

How Much Energy Do Building Energy Codes Save? Evidence from California Houses

By Arik Levinson

American Economic Review, October 2016

Regulations governing the energy efficiency of new buildings have become a cornerstone of US environmental policy. California enacted the first such codes in 1978 and has tightened them every few years since. I evaluate the resulting energy savings three ...