Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession

American Economic Review, May 2003

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2003

General Information on the Association

American Economic Review, May 2003

Certificate of Incorporation and Bylaws

American Economic Review, May 2003

Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics

By Vernon L. Smith

American Economic Review, June 2003

Optimal Pricing Mechanisms with Unknown Demand

By Ilya Segal

American Economic Review, June 2003

The standard profit-maximizing multiunit auction intersects the submitted demand curve with a preset reservation supply curve, which is determined using the distribution from which the buyers' valuations are drawn. However, when this distribution is unkno...

Animal Spirits Through Creative Destruction

By Patrick Francois and Huw Lloyd-Ellis

American Economic Review, June 2003

We show how a Schumpeterian process of creative destruction can induce rational, herd behavior by entrepreneurs across diverse sectors as if fueled by "animal spirits." Consequently, a multisector economy, in which productivity improvements are made by in...

Make Versus Buy in Trucking: Asset Ownership, Job Design, and Information

By George P. Baker and Thomas N. Hubbard

American Economic Review, June 2003

Explaining patterns of asset ownership is a central goal of both organizational economics and industrial organization. We develop a model of asset ownership in trucking, which we test by examining how the adoption of different classes of on-board computer...

Wages and Employment in the United States and Germany: What Explains the Differences?

By Paul Beaudry and David A. Green

American Economic Review, June 2003

Over the last 20 years the wage-education relationships in the United States and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education compositions of employment have evolved in a parallel fashion. In this paper, we show how these patterns shed light...

Dynamic Speculative Attacks

By Christophe Chamley

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper presents a model of rational Bayesian agents with speculative attacks in a regime of exchange rate which is pegged within a band. Speculators learn from the observation of the exchange rate within the band whether their mass is sufficiently lar...

The Performance of Forecast-Based Monetary Policy Rules Under Model Uncertainty

By Andrew Levin, Volker Wieland, and John C. Williams

American Economic Review, June 2003

We investigate the performance of forecast-based monetary policy rules using five macroeconomic models that reflect a wide range of views on aggregate dynamics. We identify the key characteristics of rules that are robust to model uncertainty; such rules ...

Optimal Design of Research Contests

By Yeon-Koo Che and Ian Gale

American Economic Review, June 2003

Procurement of an innovation often requires substantial effort by potential suppliers. Motivating effort may be difficult if the level of effort and quality of the resulting innovation are unverifiable, if innovators cannot benefit directly by marketing t...

What Do Bargainers' Preferences Look Like? Experiments with a Convex Ultimatum Game

By James Andreoni, Marco Castillo, and Ragan Petrie

American Economic Review, June 2003

The ultimatum game, by its all-or-nothing nature, makes it difficult to discern what kind of preferences may be generating choices. We explore a game that convexifies the decisions, allowing us a better look at the indifference curves of bargainers while ...

One Size Fits All? Heckscher-Ohlin Specialization in Global Production

By Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper introduces a new technique for testing the Heckscher-Ohlin model that allows for the possibility that countries with sufficiently disparate endowments specialize in unique subsets of goods. Results based upon industry-level data reject one-size...

A Theory of Defensive Skill-Biased Innovation and Globalization

By Mathias Thoenig and Thierry Verdier

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper considers a dynamic model of innovations in which firms can endogenously bias the direction of technological change. Both in a North-North and North-South context, we show that, when globalization triggers an increased threat of technological l...

School Choice: A Mechanism Design Approach

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, June 2003

A central issue in school choice is the design of a student assignment mechanism. Education literature provides guidance for the design of such mechanisms but does not offer specific mechanisms. The flaws in the existing school choice plans result in appe...

Multiproduct Quality Competition: Fighting Brands and Product Line Pruning

By Justin P. Johnson and David P. Myatt

American Economic Review, June 2003

Firms selling multiple quality-differentiated products frequently alter their product lines when a competitor enters the market. We present a model of multiproduct monopoly and duopoly using a general "upgrades" approach that yields a powerful analytical ...

Information, International Substitutability, and Globalization

By James E. Rauch and Vitor Trindade

American Economic Review, June 2003

Improved information allows home firms to rule out more potential foreign trade partners in advance of attempting to form a match. The increased responsiveness to country wage or goods price differentials resulting from this better first cut causes the ge...

Do Government Grants to Private Charities Crowd Out Giving or Fund-raising?

By James Andreoni and A. Abigail Payne

American Economic Review, June 2003

Economists have long observed that crowding out of government grants to private charities is incomplete. The accepted belief is that givers treat the grants as imperfect substitutes for private giving. We theoretically and empirically investigate a second...

Forward and Backward Intergenerational Goods: Why Is Social Security Good for the Environment?

By Antonio Rangel

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper studies the ability of nonmarket institutions to invest optimally in forward intergenerational goods (FIGs), such as education and the environment, when agents are selfish or exhibit paternalistic altruism. We show that backward intergeneration...