A Structural Perspective on the Experimentalist School

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Michael P. Keane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

What has always bothered me about the "experimentalist" school is the false sense of certainty it conveys. My view, like Leamer's, is that there is no way to escape the role of assumptions in statistical work, so our conclusions will always be contingent....

But Economics Is Not an Experimental Science

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Christopher A. Sims

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The fact is, economics is not an experimental science and cannot be. "Natural" experiments and "quasi" experiments are not in fact experiments. They are rhetorical devices that are often invoked to avoid having to confront real econometric difficulties. N...

Taking the Dogma out of Econometrics: Structural Modeling and Credible Inference

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Aviv Nevo and Michael D. Whinston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Without a doubt, there has been a "credibility revolution" in applied econometrics. One contributing development has been in the improvement and increased use in data analysis of "structural methods"; that is, the use of models based in economic theory. ...

The Other Transformation in Econometric Practice: Robust Tools for Inference

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By James H. Stock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Angrist and Pischke highlight one aspect of the research that has positively transformed econometric practice and teaching. They emphasize the rise of experiments and quasi-experiments as credible sources of identification in microeconometric studies, whi...

Geographic Variation in the Gender Differences in Test Scores

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Devin G. Pope and Justin R. Sydnor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The causes and consequences of gender disparities in standardized test scores -- especially in the high tails of achievement -- have been a topic of heated debate. The existing evidence on standardized test scores largely confirms the prevailing stereoty...

The Gender Gap in Secondary School Mathematics at High Achievement Levels: Evidence from the American Mathematics Competitions

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Glenn Ellison and Ashley Swanson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

This paper uses a new data source, American Mathematics Competitions, to examine the gender gap among high school students at very high achievement levels. The data bring out several new facts. There is a large gender gap that widens dramatically at perce...

Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The mean and standard deviation in performance on math test scores are only slightly larger for males than for females. Despite minor differences in mean performance, many more boys than girls perform at the right tail of the distribution. This gender gap...

Empirical Industrial Organization: A Progress Report

By Liran Einav and Jonathan Levin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The field of industrial organization has made dramatic advances over the last few decades in developing empirical methods for analyzing imperfect competition and the organization of markets. These new methods have diffused widely: into merger reviews and ...

The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas

By Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

This paper provides an overview of the long-term impacts of the Columbian Exchange -- that is, the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, technologies, populations, and cultures between the New World and the Old World after Christopher Columbus' voyage ...

Corporate Audits and How to Fix Them

By Joshua Ronen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Auditors are supposed to be watchdogs, but in the last decade or so, they sometimes looked like lapdogs -- more interested in serving the companies they audited than in assuring a flow of accurate information to investors. The auditing profession is based...

Markets: The Credit Rating Agencies

By Lawrence J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

This paper will explore how the financial regulatory structure propelled three credit rating agencies -- Moody's, Standard & Poor's (S&P), and Fitch -- to the center of the U.S. bond markets -- and thereby virtually guaranteed that when these rating agenc...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

Resource Allocation and Organizational Form

By Guido Friebel and Michael Raith

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

We develop a theory of firm scope and structure in which merging two firms allows the integrated firm's top management to allocate resources that are costly to trade. However, information about their use resides with division managers. We show that establ...

Front Matter

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

Information Disclosure and Unraveling in Matching Markets

By Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets. A school may suppress some information about students in order to improve their average job placement. We consider a setting with many schools, students, and jobs, and show that if early cont...

Public Provision of Private Goods and Nondistortionary Marginal Tax Rates

By Sören Blomquist, Vidar Christiansen, and Luca Micheletto

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

Using an optimal taxation model combined with a previously neglected scheme of public provision of private goods, we show that there is an efficiency gain if public provision of selected goods replaces market purchases and that efficiency requires margina...

Open Access and Dynamic Efficiency

By Tilman Klumpp and Xuejuan Su

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

In our model, production of a final good requires access to an excludable resource owned by an integrated firm. The quality of the resource depends on an investment by the owner and impacts the downstream demand curve. Under open access, the owner must s...

A Greater Price for a Greater Good? Evidence That Consumers Pay More for Charity-Linked Products

By Daniel W. Elfenbein and Brian McManus

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

To study whether consumers will pay more for products that generate charitable donations, we analyze data from eBay on charity and noncharity auctions of otherwise identical products. Charity prices are 6 percent higher, on average, than noncharity prices...