Report of the Search Committee for a JEL Editor

American Economic Review, May 2004

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2004

Information on the Association

American Economic Review, May 2004

Risk and Volatility: Econometric Models and Financial Practice

By Robert Engle

American Economic Review, June 2004

Time Series Analysis, Cointegration, and Applications

By Clive W.J. Granger

American Economic Review, June 2004

The Effects of Social Networks on Employment and Inequality

By Antoni Calvó-Armengol and Matthew O. Jackson

American Economic Review, June 2004

We develop a model where agents obtain information about job opportunities through an explicitly modeled network of social contacts. We show that employment is positively correlated across time and agents. Moreover, unemployment exhibits duration dependen...

Liquidity, Efficiency, and Bank Bailouts

By Gary Gorton and Lixin Huang

American Economic Review, June 2004

Governments can efficiently provide liquidity, as when the banking system is bailed out. We study a model in which not all assets can be used to purchase all other assets at every date. Agents sometimes want to sell projects. The market price of the proje...

Distinguishing Informational Cascades from Herd Behavior in the Laboratory

By Boğaçhan Çelen and Shachar Kariv

American Economic Review, June 2004

This paper reports an experimental test of how individuals learn from the behavior of others. By using techniques only available in the laboratory, we elicit subjects' beliefs. This allows us to distinguish informational cascades from herd behavior. By ad...

Referrals

By Luis Garicano and Tano Santos

American Economic Review, June 2004

This paper studies the matching of opportunities with talent when costly diagnosis confers an informational advantage to the agent undertaking it. When this agent is underqualified, adverse selection prevents efficient referrals through fixed-price contra...

The Role of Social Capital in Financial Development

By Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales

American Economic Review, June 2004

To identify the effect of social capital on financial development, we exploit social capital differences within Italy. In high-social-capital areas, households are more likely to use checks, invest less in cash and more in stock, have higher access to ins...

Irreversible Decisions and Record-Setting News Principles

By Svetlana Boyarchenko

American Economic Review, June 2004

In the now-classical real options theory, the price of an underlying asset is modeled as a geometric Brownian motion, and optimal exercise strategies are described by simple explicit formulas. This paper extends the classical theory to allow any geometric...

In-Kind Finance: A Theory of Trade Credit

By Mike Burkart and Tore Ellingsen

American Economic Review, June 2004

It is typically less profitable for an opportunistic borrower to divert inputs than to divert cash. Therefore, suppliers may lend more liberally than banks. This simple argument is at the core of our contract theoretic model of trade credit in competitive...

What's in a Grade? School Report Cards and the Housing Market

By David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas

American Economic Review, June 2004

This paper investigates whether the housing market responds to the information incorporated in state-administered school grades. We study whether school grades affect families' residential locations and house prices. Using detailed data on repeated sales ...

Does Foreign Direct Investment Increase the Productivity of Domestic Firms? In Search of Spillovers Through Backward Linkages

By Beata Smarzynska Javorcik

American Economic Review, June 2004

Many countries strive to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) hoping that knowledge brought by multinationals will spill over to domestic industries and increase their productivity. In contrast with earlier literature that failed to find positive intra...

Pareto-Improving Campaign Finance Policy

By Stephen Coate

American Economic Review, June 2004

This paper argues that campaign finance policy, in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing, can be Pareto improving even under very optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters. The...

Workers' Education, Spillovers, and Productivity: Evidence from Plant-Level Production Functions

By Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, June 2004

I assess the magnitude of human capital spillovers by estimating production functions using a unique firm-worker matched data set. Productivity of plants in cities that experience large increases in the share of college graduates rises more than the produ...

Efficient Patent Pools

By Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, June 2004

The paper builds a tractable model of patent pools, agreements among patent owners to license sets of their patents. It provides a necessary and sufficient condition for patent pools to enhance welfare and shows that requiring pool members to be able to i...

Is There a Politically Optimal Level of Judicial Independence?

By F. Andrew Hanssen

American Economic Review, June 2004

Independent courts render current policy more durable (by raising the cost of future policy changes) but may also engage in policy-making of their own. This paper asks: Is there an optimal level of judicial independence from the perspective of incumbent o...

Money Does Matter! Evidence from Increasing Real Income and Life Satisfaction in East Germany Following Reunification

By Paul Frijters, John P. Haisken-DeNew, and Michael A. Shields

American Economic Review, June 2004

Examining the Role of Social Isolation on Stated Preferences

By John A. List, Robert P. Berrens, Alok K. Bohara, and Joe Kerkvliet

American Economic Review, June 2004