Individual Behavior and Group Membership: Comment

By Matthias Sutter

American Economic Review, December 2009

Charness et al. (2007b) have shown that group membership has a strong effect on individual decisions in strategic games when group membership is salient through payoff commonality. In this comment, I show that their findings also apply to nonstrategic dec...

Emissions Trading, Electricity Restructuring, and Investment in Pollution Abatement

By Meredith Fowlie

American Economic Review, June 2010

This paper analyzes an emissions trading program that was introduced to reduce smog-causing pollution from large stationary sources. Using variation in state level electricity industry restructuring activity, I identify the effect of economic regulation ...

Anomalies: Intertemporal Choice

By George Loewenstein and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

We examine a number of situations in which people do not appear to discount money flows at the market rate of interest or any other single discount rate. Discount rates observed in both laboratory and field decision-making environments are shown to depend...

Technological Revolutions

By Francesco Caselli

American Economic Review, March 1999

In skill-biased (deskilling) technological revolutions, learning investments required by new machines are greater (smaller) than those required by preexisting machines. Skill-biased (deskilling) revolutions trigger reallocations of capital from slow- (fas...

Anomalies: Ultimatums, Dictators and Manners

By Colin F. Camerer and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

The recent research on ultimatum and dictator games is reviewed. New experiments reveal that the ultimatum game is quite robust to changes in stakes and the nationality of the players but dictator games are sensitive to many design features. Information i...

Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate

By Judd B. Kessler and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, August 2012

Organ donations from deceased donors provide the majority of transplanted organs in the United States, and one deceased donor can save numerous lives by providing multiple organs. Nevertheless, most Americans are not registered organ donors despite the re...

Late Budgets

By Asger Lau Andersen, David Dreyer Lassen, and Lasse Holbøll Westh Nielsen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

The budget forms the legal basis for government spending, and timely budgets, enacted before the new fiscal year, are an integral part of good governance. This paper examines the causes of late budgets using a unique dataset of budget completion dates for...

How Does the US Government Finance Fiscal Shocks?

By Antje Berndt, Hanno Lustig, and Şevin Yeltekin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

We develop a method for identifying and quantifying the fiscal channels that help finance government spending shocks. We define fiscal shocks as surprises in defense spending and show that they are more precisely identified when defense stock data are use...

Annuities and Individual Welfare

By Thomas Davidoff, Jeffrey R. Brown, and Peter A. Diamond

American Economic Review, December 2005

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness which are substantially less restrictive than those used by Menahem E. Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompl...

Quantitative Effects of Fiscal Foresight

By Eric M. Leeper, Alexander W. Richter, and Todd B. Walker

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

Legislative and implementation lags imply that substantial time evolves between when news arrives about fiscal changes and when the changes actually take place—time when households and firms can adjust their behavior. We identify two types of fiscal...

Gary Becker as Teacher

By Kevin M. Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper looks at the work of Gary S. Becker, American economist, professor of sociology, friend, and colleague of Kevin M. Murphy. Murphy discusses the traditional approach of Becker's teaching and ideas as they were expressed through his wealth of con...

Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan's Laws

By Leigh Linden and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, June 2008

We estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move-in dates of sex offenders. We find significant effects of sex offenders' locations that are geographically localized. House prices within 0.1 miles of a sex offend...

Debt Maturity and the International Financial Architecture

By Olivier Jeanne

American Economic Review, December 2009

This paper presents a theory of the maturity of international sovereign debt, and derives its implications for the reform of the international financial architecture. The analysis is based on a model in which the need to roll over external debt discipline...

Optimal Design of Trade Agreements in the Presence of Renegotiation

By Giovanni Maggi and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We study the optimal design of trade agreements when governments can renegotiate after the resolution of uncertainty but compensation between them is inefficient. In equilibrium, renegotiation always results in trade liberalization, not protection. The op...

The Social Experiment Market

By David Greenberg, Mark Shroder, and Matthew Onstott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

In social experiments, individuals, households, or organizations are randomly assigned to two or more policy interventions. Elsewhere, we have summarized 143 experiments completed by autumn 1996. Here, we use the information we have gathered on these expe...

Are State Governments Roadblocks to Federal Stimulus? Evidence on the Flypaper Effect of Highway Grants in the 2009 Recovery Act

By Sylvain Leduc and Daniel Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This paper examines how state governments adjusted spending in response to the large temporary increase in federal highway grants under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The mechanism used to apportion ARRA highway grants to states a...

The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Ethiopia

By Alessandro Tarozzi, Jaikishan Desai, and Kristin Johnson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We use data from a randomized controlled trial conducted in 2003-2006 in rural Amhara and Oromiya (Ethiopia) to study the impacts of increasing access to microfinance on a number of socioeconomic outcomes, including income from agriculture, animal husband...

An Analysis of Economic Warfare

By Jeffrey Clemens

American Economic Review, May 2013

I develop a framework for assessing economic warfare, which describes efforts to undermine adversaries' sources of income. The ability to target adversarial market participants is a primary determinant of the success of such efforts, as is the elasticity ...

Minority Groups in the Economics Profession

By Susan M. Collins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The primary objective of this paper is to provide information about minorities (blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans)in economics, at various stages in the education pipeline, and in the labor market. Despite sustained increases in the numbers and perce...

Macroeconomic Consequences of Population Aging in the United States: Overview of a National Academy Report

By Ronald D. Lee

American Economic Review, May 2014

The US population will age rapidly for several decades and then more slowly, with less aging than most rich nations. Health of the elderly has greatly improved, but disability stagnated after 2000. Retirement age reversed its decline in the mid-1990s and ...