The Science of Monetary Policy: A New Keynesian Perspective

By Richard Clarida, Jordi Gali, and Mark Gertler

Journal of Economic Literature, December 1999

The paper reviews the recent literature on monetary policy rules. We exposit the monetary policy design problem within a simple baseline theoretical framework. We then consider the implications of adding various real world complications. Among other thing...

Corporate Governance Reforms in Continental Europe

[Symposium: New Rules for Corporate Governance]

By Luca Enriques and Paolo Volpin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

The fundamental problem of corporate governance in the United States is to alleviate the conflict of interest between dispersed small shareowners and powerful controlling managers. The fundamental corporate governance in continental Europe and in most of ...

Awarding Price, Contract Performance, and Bids Screening: Evidence from Procurement Auctions

By Francesco Decarolis

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

This paper presents evidence on the perverse trade-off that first price auctions induce between low prices at the awarding stage and poor ex post performance when bids are not binding commitments. By exploiting the different timing with which first pri...

News Aggregators and Competition among Newspapers on the Internet

By Doh-Shin Jeon and Nikrooz Nasr

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

This paper studies how news aggregators affect the quality choices of newspapers competing on the Internet. To provide a micro-foundation for the role of the aggregator, we build a model of multiple issues where newspapers choose their quality on each iss...

The Effects of Investing Social Security Funds in the Stock Market When Fixed Costs Prevent Some Households from Holding Stocks

By Andrew B. Abel

American Economic Review, March 2001

With fixed costs of participating in the stock market, consumers with high income will participate in the stock market, but consumers with lower income will not participate. If a fully funded defined-contribution Social Security system tries to exploit th...

The Impact of Global Warming on Agriculture: A Ricardian Analysis: Comment

By John Quiggin and John K. Horowitz

American Economic Review, September 1999

The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying

By William R. Kerr, William F. Lincoln, and Prachi Mishra

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

How is economic policy made? In this paper we study a key determinant of the answer to the question: lobbying by firms. Estimating a binary choice model of firm behavior, we find significant evidence for the idea that barriers to entry induce persistence ...

If Exchange Rates are Random Walks, Then Almost Everything We Say About Monetary Policy is Wrong

By Fernando Alvarez, Andrew Atkeson, and Patrick J. Kehoe

American Economic Review, May 2007

Mental Accounting in Portfolio Choice: Evidence from a Flypaper Effect

By James J. Choi, David Laibson, and Brigitte C. Madrian

American Economic Review, December 2009

Consistent with mental accounting, we document that investors sometimes choose the asset allocation for one account without considering the asset allocation of their other accounts. The setting is a firm that changed its 401(k) matching rules. Initially, ...

Why Is Infant Mortality Higher in the United States Than in Europe?

By Alice Chen, Emily Oster, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

The United States has higher infant mortality than peer countries. In this paper, we combine microdata from the United States with similar data from four European countries to investigate this US infant mortality disadvantage. The US disadvantage persi...

Cycles of Conflict: An Economic Model

By Daron Acemoglu and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, April 2014

We propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions. G...

Bid Takers or Market Makers? The Effect of Auctioneers on Auction Outcome

By Nicola Lacetera, Bradley J. Larsen, Devin G. Pope, and Justin R. Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

Auction design has been studied extensively; however, within a given design, does the process of how an auction is conducted matter as well? We address this question by looking for heterogeneity in the performance of auctioneers in English auctions. We an...

Measuring the Benefits of Greater Spatial Granularity in Short-Term Pricing in Wholesale Electricity Markets

By Frank A. Wolak

American Economic Review, May 2011

Hourly generation unit-level output levels, detailed information on the technological characteristics of generation units, and daily delivered natural gas prices to all generation units for the California wholesale electricity market before and after the ...

The Use of Performance Measures in Incentive Contracting

By George Baker

American Economic Review, May 2000

The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development

By Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting ...

Mismeasured Variables in Econometric Analysis: Problems from the Right and Problems from the Left

[Symposium: Econometric Tools]

By Jerry Hausman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

The effect of mismeasured variables in the most straightforward regression analysis with a single regressor variable leads to a least squares estimate that is downward biased in magnitude toward zero. I begin by reviewing classical issues involving mismea...

Efficient Bailouts?

By Javier Bianchi

American Economic Review, December 2016

We develop a quantitative equilibrium model of financial crises to assess the interaction between ex post interventions in credit markets and the buildup of risk ex ante. During a systemic crisis, bailouts relax balance sheet constraints and mitigate the ...

Experimentation, Patents, and Innovation

By Daron Acemoglu, Kostas Bimpikis, and Asuman Ozdaglar

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2011

This paper studies a simple model of experimentation and innovation. Our analysis suggests that patents improve the allocation of resources by encouraging rapid experimentation and efficient ex post transfer of knowledge. Each firm receives a signal on th...

Belief Elicitation with a Synchronized Lottery Choice Menu That Is Invariant to Risk Attitudes

By Charles A. Holt and Angela M. Smith

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

This paper uses a Bayesian information processing task to compare belief elicitation mechanisms including a quadratic scoring rule, a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak pricing procedure, and a two-stage menu of lottery choices that is structured to identify a preci...

The Impact of Regulations on the Supply and Quality of Care in Child Care Markets

By V. Joseph Hotz and Mo Xiao

American Economic Review, August 2011

We examine the impact of state child care regulations on the supply and quality of care in child care markets. We exploit panel data on both individual establishments and local markets to control for state, time, and, where possible, establishment-specifi...