Majority Rule and Utilitarian Welfare

By Vijay Krishna and John Morgan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

We study the welfare properties of majority and supermajority rules when voting is costly and values, costs, and electorate sizes are all random. Unlike previous work, where the electorate size was either fixed or Poisson distributed, and exhibited no lim...

Separated at Girth: US Twin Estimates of the Effects of Birth Weight

By Heather Royer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

The fetal origins hypothesis asserts that nutrient deprivation in utero can raise chronic disease risk. Within economics, this hypothesis has gained acceptance as a leading explanation for the correlations between birth weight, a proxy for fetal nutrie...

Present-Biased Preferences and Credit Card Borrowing

By Stephan Meier and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

Some individuals borrow extensively on their credit cards. This paper tests whether present-biased time preferences correlate with credit card borrowing. In a field study, we elicit individual time preferences with incentivized choice experiments, and ...

Leader Punishment and Cooperation in Groups: Experimental Field Evidence from Commons Management in Ethiopia

By Michael Kosfeld and Devesh Rustagi

American Economic Review, February 2015

We conduct a social dilemma experiment in which real-world leaders can punish group members as a third party. Despite facing an identical environment, leaders are found to take remarkably different punishment approaches. The different leader types reve...

Projection Bias in Catalog Orders

By Michael Conlin, Ted O'Donoghue, and Timothy J. Vogelsang

American Economic Review, September 2007

Evidence suggests that people understand qualitatively how tastes change over time, but underestimate the magnitudes. This evidence is limited, however, to laboratory evidence or surveys of reported happiness. We test for such projection bias in field ...

Naked Exclusion and the Volatility of Innovation

By Christodoulos Stefanadis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

The analysis shows that the volatility of a potential entrant's innovation is an important parameter that shapes an incumbent supplier's exclusivity strategy. Higher volatility encourages the incumbent supplier to adopt an accommodation strategy rather th...

Love and Money by Parental Matchmaking: Evidence from Urban Couples in China

By Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Jin, and Lixin Colin Xu

American Economic Review, May 2012

Parental involvement in marriage matchmaking may distort the optimal spouse choice because parents are willing to substitute love for money. The rationale is that the joint income of married children can be shared among extended family members more easily...

The Generalized War of Attrition

By Jeremy Bulow and Paul Klemperer

American Economic Review, March 1999

The authors model a war of attrition with N+K firms competing for N prizes. In a 'natural oligopoly' context, the K - 1 lowest-value firms drop out instantaneously, even though each firm's value is private information to itself. In a 'standard setting' co...

Race, Ethnicity, and Discriminatory Zoning

By Allison Shertzer, Tate Twinam, and Randall P. Walsh

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

Zoning policies can have marked impacts on the spatial distribution of people and land use, yet there is little systematic evidence on their origin. Investigating the causes of these regulations is complicated by the fact that land use and zoning have bee...

The Willingness to Pay—Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations: Reply

By Charles R. Plott and Kathryn Zeiler

American Economic Review, April 2011

Isoni, Loomes, and Sugden (2011) assert that Plott and Zeiler (2005) reported inaccurate results. Placing ILS's selective quotes into context demonstrates otherwise. Additionally, examining the data closely yields three conclusions. First, all mug data re...

Markups and Firm-Level Export Status

By Jan De Loecker and Frederic Warzynski

American Economic Review, October 2012

In this paper, we develop a method to estimate markups using plant-level production data. Our approach relies on cost-minimizing producers and the existence of at least one variable input of production. The suggested empirical framework relies on the est...

What Can Be Done to Improve Struggling High Schools?

[Symposium: Early and Later Interventions]

By Julie Berry Cullen, Steven D. Levitt, Erin Robertson, and Sally Sadoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013

In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, but more generally, the economic futures of the student...

The Effect of Disability Insurance Payments on Beneficiaries' Earnings

By Alexander Gelber, Timothy J. Moore, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

A crucial issue is whether social insurance affects work decisions through income or substitution effects. We examine this in the context of US Social Security Disability Insurance (DI), exploiting discontinuous changes in the benefit formula with a regre...

An Early Application of the Average Total Cost Concept

By F. M. Scherer

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

Signals of Child Achievement as Determinants of Child Support

By Alison Aughinbaugh

American Economic Review, May 2001

Household Behavior and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

[Symposium: Tax Reform]

By Jerry A. Hausman and James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

President Reagan's May 1985 letter to Congress, accompanying his tax reform proposal, argued that the existing tax system hindered economic growth because "most Americans labor under excessively high tax rates that discourage work and cut drastically into...

Demand Shocks and Open Economy Puzzles

By Yan Bai and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull

American Economic Review, May 2015

We pose good markets frictions on top of an otherwise standard two-country international real business cycle (IRBC) model. Shopping for goods takes effort, which prevents perfect matching between customers and producers. An increase in search effort impli...

Bailouts and the Preservation of Competition: The Case of the Federal Timber Contract Payment Modification Act

By James W. Roberts and Andrew Sweeting

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

We estimate the value of competition in United States Forest Service (USFS) timber auctions, in the context of the Reagan administration's bailout of firms that faced substantial losses on existing contracts. We use a model with endogenous entry by asymme...

Identifying the Aggregate Productivity Effects of Entry and Size Restrictions: An Empirical Analysis of License Reform in India

By A. V. Chari

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

Distortions in the allocation of resources between heterogeneous producers have the potential to generate large reductions in aggregate productivity, a point that has been stressed by recent studies. There is, however, little direct empirical evidence f...

Expansions in Maternity Leave Coverage and Children's Long-Term Outcomes

By Christian Dustmann and Uta Schönberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

This paper evaluates the impact of three major expansions in maternity leave coverage in Germany on children's long-run outcomes. To identify the causal impact of the reforms, we use a difference-indifference design that compares outcomes of children bor...