Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference

By Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Nichole Szembrot

American Economic Review, September 2014

This paper proposes foundations and a methodology for survey-based tracking of well-being. First, we develop a theory in which utility depends on "fundamental aspects" of well-being, measurable with surveys. Second, drawing from psychologists, philosopher...

Optimal Tax and Expenditure Policy with Aggregate Uncertainty

By Felix J. Bierbrauer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

We study optimal income taxation and public-goods provision under the assumption that the cross-section distributions of productive abilities or public-goods preferences are not known a priori. A conventional Mirrleesian treatment is shown to provoke ma...

Competition among Sellers in Securities Auctions

By Alexander S. Gorbenko and Andrey Malenko

American Economic Review, August 2011

We study simultaneous security-bid second-price auctions with competition among sellers for potential bidders. The sellers compete by designing ordered sets of securities that the bidders can offer as payment for the assets. Upon observing auction design...

The Bidder's Curse

By Ulrike Malmendier and Young Han Lee

American Economic Review, April 2011

We employ a novel approach to identify overbidding in auctions. We compare online auction prices to fixed prices for the same item on the same webpage. In detailed data on auctions of a board game, 42 percent of auctions exceed the simultaneous fixed pric...

The First Year of the Eurosystem: Inflation Targeting or Not?

By Lars E. O. Svensson

American Economic Review, May 2000

Trading Dollars for Dollars: The Price of Attention Online and Offline

By Matthew Gentzkow

American Economic Review, May 2014

Popular accounts suggest that advertising revenue per unit of consumer attention is lower online than offline, and has fallen in traditional media as the Internet has made advertising markets more competitive. I assess these claims theoretically and empir...

Income Inequality and Trade: How to Think, What to Conclude

[Symposium: Income Inequality and Trade]

By J. David Richardson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

Recent econometric work and growing analytical consensus suggest that exogenous international market pressures are a contributing factor to trends in U.S. wage/earnings inequality. Trade accounts for a share of these inequality trends close to or somewhat...

Language, Meaning, and Games: A Model of Communication, Coordination, and Evolution: Comment

By Yuval Heller

American Economic Review, June 2014

Demichelis & Weibull (AER 2008) show that adding lexicographic lying costs to coordination games with cheap talk yields a sharp prediction: only the efficient outcome is evolutionarily stable. I show that this result is caused by the discontinuity of p...

Women Helping Women, Men Helping Women? Same-Gender Mentoring, Initial Job Placements, and Early Career Publishing Success for Economics PhDs

By Christiana Hilmer and Michael Hilmer

American Economic Review, May 2007

Evaluating Behaviorally Motivated Policy: Experimental Evidence from the Lightbulb Market

By Hunt Allcott and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Review, August 2015

Imperfect information and inattention to energy costs are important potential motivations for energy efficiency standards and subsidies. We evaluate these motivations in the lightbulb market using a theoretical model and two randomized experiments. We der...

In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies

By Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, and Richard McElreath

American Economic Review, May 2001

Excise Taxes with Multiproduct Transactions

By Stephen F. Hamilton

American Economic Review, March 2009

I examine excise taxes levied on multiproduct retailers. Excise taxes reduce equilibrium output and decrease equilibrium product variety in the short run, but taxes can raise output per product in the long run and induce entry. Excise taxes are overshifte...

How Economics Faculty Can Survive (and Perhaps Thrive) in a Brave New Online World

[Symposium: Online Higher Education]

By Peter Navarro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

The academy in which we toil is moving rapidly towards a greater role for online delivery of higher education, and both fans and skeptics offer strong reasons to believe this technological shock will have substantial disruptive effects on faculty. H...

Mansion Tax: The Effect of Transfer Taxes on the Residential Real Estate Market

By Wojciech Kopczuk and David Munroe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

Using discontinuities in housing transaction taxes in New York and New Jersey we find robust price bunching. Incidence for transactions local to the notch falls on sellers, with no evidence of evasion. The volume of missing transactions above the notch ex...

The Familiar but Curious Economics of Higher Education: Introduction to a Symposium

[Symposium: The Economics of Higher Education]

By Charles T. Clotfelter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

Despite the involvement of two-thirds of economists in it, the higher education industry remains incompletely understood. Among the topics related to higher education that invite further research are the rapid increase in college costs, the interaction of...

The Corporate Bankruptcy Decision

By Michelle J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

Economic theory suggests that bankruptcy should serve as a screening process designed to eliminate only those firms that are economically inefficient and whose resources could be better used in some other activity. However, firms typically file for bankru...

Pooling with Essential and Nonessential Patents

By Daniel Quint

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

Several recent technological standards were accompanied by patent pools—arrangements to license relevant intellectual property as a package. A key distinction made by regulators—between patents essential to a standard and patents with substitutes—ha...

Economics versus Politics: Pitfalls of Policy Advice

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013

The standard approach to policy making and advice in economics implicitly or explicitly ignores politics and political economy and maintains that if possible, any market failure should be rapidly removed. This essay explains why this conclusion may be inc...

Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space

By J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil

American Economic Review, April 2012

We develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventional...

Does the Technological Content of Government Demand Matter for Private R&D? Evidence from US States

By Viktor Slavtchev and Simon Wiederhold

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2016

Governments purchase everything from airplanes to zucchini. This paper investigates the role of the technological content of government procurement in innovation. In a theoretical model, we first show that a shift in the composition of public purchases to...