American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2005

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2005

Are Two Heads Better Than One? Team versus Individual Play in Signaling Games

By David J. Cooper and John H. Kagel

American Economic Review, June 2005

We compare individuals with two-person teams in signaling game experiments. Teams consistently play more strategically than individuals and generate positive synergies in more difficult games, beating a demanding "truth-wins" norm. The superior performanc...

Sunspots in the Laboratory

By John Duffy and Eric O'N. Fisher

American Economic Review, June 2005

We show that extrinsic or nonfundamental uncertainty influences markets in a controlled environment. This work provides the first direct evidence of sunspot equilibria. These equilibria require a common understanding of the semantics of the sunspot variab...

The Willingness to Pay-Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations

By Charles R. Plott and Kathryn Zeiler

American Economic Review, June 2005

We conduct experiments to explore the possibility that subject misconceptions, as opposed to a particular theory of preferences referred to as the "endowment effect," account for reported gaps between willingness to pay ("WTP") and willingness to accept (...

The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

American Economic Review, June 2005

The rise of Western Europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean and with substantial trade with the New World, Africa, and Asia via the Atlantic. This trade and the associated colonialism affected Europe not o...

Mortality Reductions, Educational Attainment, and Fertility Choice

By Rodrigo R. Soares

American Economic Review, June 2005

This paper develops a model where reductions in mortality are the main force behind economic development. The model generates a pattern of changes similar to the demographic transition, where gains in life expectancy at birth are followed by reductions in...

International Unions

By Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, and Federico Etro

American Economic Review, June 2005

We model an international union as a group of countries deciding to centralize the provision of public goods, or policies, that generate externalities across union members. The trade-off between the benefits of coordination and the loss of independent pol...

Competition and Incentives with Motivated Agents

By Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak

American Economic Review, June 2005

A unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission, as opposed to profit, as an organizational goal. Such mission-oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated ...

Long-Term Contracting with Markovian Consumers

By Marco Battaglini

American Economic Review, June 2005

To study how a firm can capitalize on a long-term customer relationship, we characterize the optimal contract between a monopolist and a consumer whose preferences follow a Markov process. The optimal contract is nonstationary and has infinite memory, but...

Equilibrium Investment and Asset Prices under Imperfect Corporate Control

By James Dow, Gary Gorton, and Arvind Krishnamurthy

American Economic Review, June 2005

We integrate a widely accepted version of the separation of ownership and control—Michael Jensen's (1986) free cash flow theory—into a dynamic equilibrium model, and study the effect of imperfect corporate control on asset prices and investment. Aggre...

State "Currencies" and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Clarifying Some Confusions

By Ronald W. Michener and Robert E. Wright

American Economic Review, June 2005

Farley W. Grubb's recent papers on the early U.S. monetary system would be important contributions to the common currency area literature were not most of their historical assertions questionable and their key assumption—that the medium of exchange can ...

The Variety and Quality of a Nation's Exports

By David Hummels and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, June 2005

Large economies export more in absolute terms than do small economies. We use data on shipments by 126 exporting countries to 59 importing countries in 5,000 product categories to answer the question: How? Do big economies export larger quantities of each...

Understanding European Real Exchange Rates

By Mario J. Crucini, Chris I. Telmer, and Marios Zachariadis

American Economic Review, June 2005

We study good-by-good deviations from the Law-of-One-Price (LOP) for over 1,800 retail goods and services between all European Union (EU) countries for the years 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990. We find that for each of these years, after we control for differ...

House Prices, Borrowing Constraints, and Monetary Policy in the Business Cycle

By Matteo Iacoviello

American Economic Review, June 2005

I develop and estimate a monetary business cycle model with nominal loans and collateral constraints tied to housing values. Demand shocks move housing and nominal prices in the same direction, and are amplified and propagated over time. The financial acc...

Some Evolutionary Foundations for Price Level Rigidity

By Gilles Saint-Paul

American Economic Review, June 2005

This paper shows that price rigidity evolves in an economy populated by imperfectly rational agents who experiment with alternative rules of thumb. In the model, firms must set their prices in face of aggregate demand shocks. Their payoff depends on the l...

Do Rural Banks Matter? Evidence from the Indian Social Banking Experiment

By Robin Burgess and Rohini Pande

American Economic Review, June 2005

Ethnic Polarization, Potential Conflict, and Civil Wars

By José G. Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol

American Economic Review, June 2005

Does Competition for Capital Discipline Governments? Decentralization, Globalization, and Public Policy

By Hongbin Cai and Daniel Treisman

American Economic Review, June 2005

The Evolution of High Incomes in Northern America: Lessons from Canadian Evidence

By Emmanuel Saez and Michael R. Veall

American Economic Review, June 2005