Can Mandated Political Representation Increase Policy Influence for Disadvantaged Minorities? Theory and Evidence from India

By Rohini Pande

American Economic Review, September 2003

A basic premise of representative democracy is that all those subject to policy should have a voice in its making. However, policies enacted by electorally accountable governments often fail to reflect the interests of disadvantaged minorities. This paper...

Are Mergers Beneficial to Consumers? Evidence from the Market for Bank Deposits

By Dario Focarelli and Fabio Panetta

American Economic Review, September 2003

The general conclusion of the empirical literature is that in-market consolidation generates adverse price changes, harming consumers. Previous studies, however, look only at the short-run pricing impact of consolidation, ignoring effects that take longer...

To Float or to Fix: Evidence on the Impact of Exchange Rate Regimes on Growth

By Eduardo Levy-Yeyati and Federico Sturzenegger

American Economic Review, September 2003

We study the relationship between exchange rate regimes and economic growth for a sample of 183 countries over the post-Bretton Woods period, using a new de facto classification of regimes based on the actual behavior of the relevant macroeconomic variabl...

Network Effects, Congestion Externalities, and Air Traffic Delays: Or Why Not All Delays Are Evil

By Christopher Mayer and Todd Sinai

American Economic Review, September 2003

We examine two factors that explain air traffic congestion: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. While both factors impact congestion, we find that the hubbing effect dominates empirically. Hub carriers incur most of the additiona...

International Business Cycles: World, Region, and Country-Specific Factors

By M. Ayhan Kose, Christopher Otrok, and Charles H. Whiteman

American Economic Review, September 2003

The paper investigates the common dynamic properties of business-cycle fluctuations across countries, regions, and the world. We employ a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to estimate common components in macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, ...

Technological Change and the Stock Market

By John Laitner and Dmitriy Stolyarov

American Economic Review, September 2003

Tobin's average q has usually been well above 1, but fell below 1 during 1974-1984. Our model explains this pattern and reconciles it with unchanging aggregate investment. The stock market value in the numerator of q reflects ownership of physical capital...

Plants and Productivity in International Trade

By Andrew B. Bernard, Jonathan Eaton, J. Bradford Jensen, and Samuel Kortum

American Economic Review, September 2003

We reconcile trade theory with plant-level export behavior, extending the Ricardian model to accommodate many countries, geographic barriers, and imperfect competition. Our model captures qualitatively basic facts about U.S. plants: (i) productivity dispe...

The Economic Significance of National Border Effects

By Carolyn L. Evans

American Economic Review, September 2003

To address the economic significance of national border effects, this paper provides evidence on two fundamental questions: (1) Do large border effects arise because of high perceived-price wedges between foreign and domestic products, or because imports ...

Is the Threat of Reemployment Services More Effective Than the Services Themselves? Evidence from Random Assignment in the UI System

By Dan A. Black, Jeffrey A. Smith, Mark C. Berger, and Brett J. Noel

American Economic Review, September 2003

We examine the effect of the Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services system. This program "profiles" Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants to determine their probability of benefit exhaustion and then provides mandatory employment and training services...

Information, Decisions, and Productivity: On-Board Computers and Capacity Utilization in Trucking

By Thomas N. Hubbard

American Economic Review, September 2003

Productivity reflects not only how efficiently inputs are transformed into outputs, but also how well information is applied to resource allocation decisions. This paper examines how information technology has affected capacity utilization in the trucking...

Upward Bias in the Estimated Returns to Education: Evidence from South Africa

By Thomas Hertz

American Economic Review, September 2003

Inflation Persistence and Relative Contracting

By Steinar Holden and John C. Driscoll

American Economic Review, September 2003

The Importance of Group Coverage: How Tax Policy Shaped U.S. Health Insurance

By Melissa A. Thomasson

American Economic Review, September 2003

Why Dowries?

By Maristella Botticini and Aloysius Siow

American Economic Review, September 2003

The Most Technologically Progressive Decade of the Century

By Alexander J. Field

American Economic Review, September 2003

Wage Adjustment Under Low Inflation: Evidence from U.S. History

By Christopher Hanes and John A. James

American Economic Review, September 2003

Competition, Risk, and Managerial Incentives

By Michael Raith

American Economic Review, September 2003

Elephants: Comment

By Erwin H. Bulte, Richard D. Horan, and Jason F. Shogren

American Economic Review, September 2003

Elephants: Reply

By Michael Kremer and Charles Morcom

American Economic Review, September 2003

Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics

By Daniel Kahneman

American Economic Review, December 2003