Using Engel's Law to Estimate CPI Bias

By Bruce W. Hamilton

American Economic Review, June 2001

Does Buffer-Stock Saving Explain the Smoothness and Excess Sensitivity of Consumption?

By Sydney C. Ludvigson and Alexander Michaelides

American Economic Review, June 2001

Demand Systems with and without Errors

By Arthur Lewbel

American Economic Review, June 2001

Revealed preference theory assumes that each consumer has demands that are rational, meaning that they arise from the maximization of his or her own utility function. In contrast, econometric or statistical demand models assume that each consumer's demand...

Simulating Fundamental Tax Reform in the United States

By David Altig, Alan J. Auerbach, Laurence J. Koltikoff, Kent A. Smetters, and Jan Walliser

American Economic Review, June 2001

This paper uses a new, large-scale, dynamic life-cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of transitions to five fundamental alternatives to the U.S. federal income tax, including a proportional consumption tax and a flat ta...

Is a Uniform Social Policy Better? Fiscal Federalism and Factor Mobility

By Roberto Perotti

American Economic Review, June 2001

This paper develops a two-country model to study two questions. How do the degrees of centralization of redistribution and of factor mobility affect the productive efficiency of the economies? What degrees of centralization of redistribution and of factor...

Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture

By H. Peyton Young and Mary A. Burke

American Economic Review, June 2001

Survey data suggest that cropsharing contracts exhibit a much higher degree of uniformity than is warranted by economic fundamentals. We propose a dynamic model of contract choice to explain this phenomenon. Landowners and tenants recontract periodically,...

Optimal Incentives for Teams

By Yeon-Koo Che and Seung-Weon Yoo

American Economic Review, June 2001

Much of the existing theory of incentives describes a static relationship that lasts for just one transaction. This static assumption is not only unrealistic, but the resulting predictions appear to be at odds with many work organizations. The current pap...

The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests

By Benny Moldovanu and Aner Sela

American Economic Review, June 2001

We study a contest with multiple, nonidentical prizes. Participants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) affecting their costs of effort. The contestant with the highest effort wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest eff...

The Value of Information in Efficient Risk-Sharing Arrangements

By Edward E. Schlee

American Economic Review, June 2001

Suppose that agents share risks in competitive markets. We show that better information makes everyone worse off if the economy has a representative agent--that is, the economy's demand for state-contingent consumption equals the demand of a hypothetical ...

A Theory of Buyer-Seller Networks

By Rachel E. Kranton and Deborah F. Minehart

American Economic Review, June 2001

This paper introduces a new model of exchange: networks, rather than markets, of buyers and sellers. It begins with the empirically motivated premise that a buyer and seller must have a relationship, a "link," to exchange goods. Networks--buyers, sellers,...

Costly Predation and the Distribution of Competence

By John Conlisk

American Economic Review, June 2001

An evolutionary game model shows how an equilibrium distribution of competence may evolve when members of a population prey on one another, but when predatory competence is costly to acquire. Under one interpretation, the competence distribution is an end...

Information Gatekeepers on the Internet and the Competitiveness of Homogeneous Product Markets

By Michael R. Baye and John Morgan

American Economic Review, June 2001

We examine the equilibrium interaction between a market for price information (controlled by a gatekeeper) and the homogenous product market it serves. The gatekeeper charges fees to firms that advertise prices on its Internet site and to consumers who ac...

Auctions with Resale Markets: An Application to U.S. Forest Service Timber Sales

By Philip A. Haile

American Economic Review, June 2001

When bidders anticipate an opportunity for resale trade, the value of winning an auction is determined in part by the option values of buying and selling in the secondary market. One implication is that a bidder's willingness to pay at an auction increase...

Vertical Integration, Market Foreclosure, and Consumer Welfare in the Cable Television Industry

By Tasneem Chipty

American Economic Review, June 2001

I examine the effects of vertical integration between programming and distribution in the cable television industry. I assess the effects of ownership structure on program offerings, prices, and subscriptions, and I compare consumer welfare across integra...

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2001

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2001

Economic Choices

By Daniel McFadden

American Economic Review, June 2001

Rules, Communication, and Collusion: Narrative Evidence from the Sugar Institute Case

By David Genesove and Wallace P. Mullin

American Economic Review, June 2001

Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar-refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased...

Report of the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession

By William Darity Jr. and Cecilia A. Conrad

American Economic Review, May 2001

Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession

By Beth Allen

American Economic Review, May 2001