The Pluralism of Fairness Ideals: An Experimental Approach

By Alexander W. Cappelen, Astri Drange Hole, Erik Ø Sørensen, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, June 2007

A core question in the contemporary debate on distributive justice is how to understand fairness in situations involving production. Important theories of distributive justice, such as strict egalitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, and libertarianism, ...

Efficient Kidney Exchange: Coincidence of Wants in Markets with Compatibility-Based Preferences

By Alvin E. Roth, Tayfun Sönmez, and M. Utku Ünver

American Economic Review, June 2007

Patients needing kidney transplants may have donors who cannot donate to them because of blood or tissue incompatibility. Incompatible patient-donor pairs can exchange donor kidneys with other pairs only when there is a "double coincidence of wants." D...

Signaling Character in Electoral Competition

By Navin Kartik and R. Preston McAfee

American Economic Review, June 2007

We study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have "character" and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. Character is desira...

Harmonization and Side Payments in Political Cooperation

By Bård Harstad

American Economic Review, June 2007

For two districts or countries that try to internalize externalities, I analyze a bargaining game under private information. I derive conditions for when it is efficient with uniform policies across regions—with and without side payments— a...

Meeting Strangers and Friends of Friends: How Random Are Social Networks?

By Matthew O. Jackson and Brian W. Rogers

American Economic Review, June 2007

We present a dynamic model of network formation where nodes find other nodes with whom to form links in two ways: some are found uniformly at random, while others are found by searching locally through the current structure of the network (e.g., meetin...

Contracts and Technology Adoption

By Daron Acemoglu, Pol Antràs, and Elhanan Helpman

American Economic Review, June 2007

We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model, a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activi...

Leadership and Information

By Mana Komai, Mark Stegeman, and Benjamin E. Hermalin

American Economic Review, June 2007

An organization makes collective decisions through neither markets nor contracts. Instead, rational agents voluntarily choose to follow a leader. In many cases, incentive problems are solved: the unique nondegenerate equilibrium achieves the first best, e...

Social Interactions in High School: Lessons from an Earthquake

By Piero Cipollone and Alfonso Rosolia

American Economic Review, June 2007

After an earthquake hit Southern Italy in 1980, young men from certain towns were exempted from compulsory military service. We show that the exemption raised high-school-graduation rates of boys by more than 2 percentage points. We do this by comparing h...

Measuring Self-Control Problems

By John Ameriks, Andrew Caplin, John Leahy, and Tom Tyler

American Economic Review, June 2007

We develop a survey instrument to measure self-control problems in a sample of highly educated adults. This measure relates in the manner that theory predicts to liquid wealth accumulation and personality measures. Yet while self-control problems are typi...

Regulation, Capital, and the Evolution of Organizational Form in US Life Insurance

By George Zanjani

American Economic Review, June 2007

This paper studies the association between regulation and the organizational form of new life insurers between 1900 and 1949. The mutual form was popular in states with low initial capital requirements for mutual companies and differentially higher requir...

Sticky-Price Models and Durable Goods

By Robert B. Barsky, Christopher L. House, and Miles S. Kimball

American Economic Review, June 2007

The inclusion of a durable goods sector in sticky-price models has strong and unexpected implications. Even if most prices are flexible, a small durable goods sector with sticky prices may be sufficient to make aggregate output react to monetary policy as...

Trust as a Signal of a Social Norm and the Hidden Costs of Incentive Schemes

By Dirk Sliwka

American Economic Review, June 2007

An explanation for motivation crowding-out phenomena is developed in a social preferences framework. Besides selfish and fair or altruistic types, a third type of agent is introduced. These "conformists" have social preferences if they believe that suffic...

Tradeoffs from Integrating Diagnosis and Treatment in Markets for Health Care

By Christopher C. Afendulis and Daniel P. Kessler

American Economic Review, June 2007

To identify the important tradeoffs in consulting a single expert for both diagnosis and treatment, we examine the costs and health outcomes of elderly Medicare beneficiaries with coronary artery disease. We compare the empirical consequences of diagnosis...

ABCs (and Ds) of Understanding VARs

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez, Thomas J. Sargent, and Mark W. Watson

American Economic Review, June 2007

The dynamics of a linear (or linearized) dynamic stochastic economic model can be expressed in terms of matrices (A, B, C, D) that define a state space system for a vector of observables. An associated state space system (A,ˆB,C,ˆD) determines a vector ...

Matching and Price Competition: Comment

By Fuhito Kojima

American Economic Review, June 2007

Effects of Environmental and Land Use Regulation in the Oil and Gas Industry Using the Wyoming Checkerboard as a Natural Experiment: Retraction

By Shelby Gerking and William E. Morgan

American Economic Review, June 2007

Auditors' Report/Audited Financial Statements

American Economic Review, June 2007

Introducing Incentives in the Market for Live and Cadaveric Organ Donations

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By Gary S. Becker and Julio Jorge Elías

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

We evaluate the introduction of monetary incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations. We show that monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets,...

Producing Organ Donors

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By David H. Howard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Organ transplantation is one of the greatest technological achievements of modern medicine, but the ability of patients to benefit from transplantation is limited by shortages of transplantable organs. The median waiting time for patients placed on the ki...

Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By Alvin E. Roth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

This essay examines how repugnance sometimes constrains what transactions and markets we see. When my colleagues and I have helped design markets and allocation procedures, we have often found that distaste for certain kinds of transactions is a real cons...