Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms

By Shengwu Li

American Economic Review, November 2017

A strategy is obviously dominant if, for any deviation, at any information set where both strategies first diverge, the best outcome under the deviation is no better than the worst outcome under the dominant strategy. A mechanism is obviously strategy-p...

Canada: Life beyond the Looking Glass

[Symposium: The North American Economy]

By John F. Helliwell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

Canada's population, a tenth that of the United States, is perched close to the U.S. northern border, tightly but asymmetrically tied to U.S. information networks. However, trade, capital and population mobility remains an order of magnitude tighter among...

The Effect of Education on Adult Mortality and Health: Evidence from Britain

By Damon Clark and Heather Royer

American Economic Review, October 2013

There is a strong, positive, and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling la...

Theory versus Empiricism in Academic Economics: Update and Comparisons

By Theodore Morgan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Six years ago, Wassily Leontief, a past president of the American Economic Association and Nobel Laureate, analyzed the kinds of articles published in the American Economic Review. He focused on the proportion of articles devoted to theory as compared to ...

Democracy and Foreign Education

By Antonio Spilimbergo

American Economic Review, March 2009

Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign-educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a unique panel dataset on foreign students starting in t...

Equilibrium Incentives in Oligopoly: Corrigendum

By Chaim Fershtman and Kenneth L. Judd

American Economic Review, September 2006

Are Long-Run Inflation Expectations Anchored More Firmly in the Euro Area Than in the United States?

By Meredith J. Beechey, Benjamin K. Johannsen, and Andrew T. Levin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2011

This paper compares the evolution of long-run inflation expectations in the euro area and the United States, using evidence from financial markets and surveys of professional forecasters. Survey data indicate that long-run inflation expectations are reaso...

Conversations among Competitors

By Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Review, December 2008

I develop a model of bilateral conversations in which players honestly exchange ideas with their competitors. The key to incentive compatibility is complementarity in the information structure: a player can generate a new insight only if he has access to ...

Classroom Games: Making Money

By Susan K. Laury and Charles A. Holt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

Economics is often taught at a level of abstraction that can hinder some students from gaining basic intuition. However, lecture and textbook presentations can be complemented with classroom exercises in which students make decisions and interact. The app...

Taxes on the Internet: Deterrence Effects of Public Disclosure

By Erlend E. Bø, Joel Slemrod, and Thor O. Thoresen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

Although Norway has a long tradition of public disclosure of tax filings, starting in 2001 anyone with Internet access could obtain individual information on income and income taxes paid. We examine the effect on income reporting of this change in the deg...

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2011

Preferences and Incentives of Appointed and Elected Public Officials: Evidence from State Trial Court Judges

By Claire S. H. Lim

American Economic Review, June 2013

We study how two selection systems for public officials, appointment and election, affect policy outcomes, focusing on state court judges and their criminal sentencing decisions. First, under appointment, policy congruence with voter preferences is att...

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

By Antonio Cabrales, Raffaele Miniaci, Marco Piovesan, and Giovanni Ponti

American Economic Review, December 2010

This paper reports a three-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects' social and reciprocity concerns. In the last phase, four principals compete by offering agents a ...

Gender Gap in Performance under Competitive Pressure: Admissions to Czech Universities

By Štěpán Jurajda and Daniel Münich

American Economic Review, May 2011

Do women perform worse than equally able men in stressful competitive settings? We ask this question for competitions with a high payoff—admissions to tuition-free selective universities. With data on an entire cohort of Czech students graduating fr...

Superstar Cities

By Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

We document large long-run differences in average house price appreciation across metropolitan areas over the past 50 years, and show they can be explained by an inelastic supply of land in some unique locations combined with an increasing number of hi...

Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, September 2014

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on s...

Using Loopholes to Reveal the Marginal Cost of Regulation: The Case of Fuel-Economy Standards

By Soren T. Anderson and James M. Sallee

American Economic Review, June 2011

Estimating the cost of regulation is difficult. Firms sometimes reveal costs indirectly, however, when they exploit loopholes to avoid regulation. We apply this insight to fuel economy standards for automobiles. These standards feature a loophole that ...

On the Antitrust Treatment of Production Joint Ventures

[Symposium: Collaboration, Innovation and Antitrust]

By Carl Shapiro and Robert D. Willig

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The U.S. Congress is currently considering several bills to alter the antitrust treatment of collaborative production activities among rival firms. This paper sketches the tradeoffs involved in altering U.S. antitrust treatment of joint venture production...

The Demand for Food of Poor Urban Mexican Households: Understanding Policy Impacts Using Structural Models

By Manuela Angelucci and Orazio Attanasio

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

We use Oportunidades, a conditional cash transfer to women, to show that standard demand models do not represent the sample's behavior: Oportunidades increases eligible households' food budget shares, despite food being a necessity; demand for food and...

Ethnicity and Conflict: An Empirical Study

By Joan Esteban, Laura Mayoral, and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, June 2012

We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenb...