Self-Interest through Delegation: An Additional Rationale for the Principal-Agent Relationship

By John R. Hamman, George Loewenstein, and Roberto A. Weber

American Economic Review, September 2010

Principal-agent relationships are typically assumed to be motivated by efficiency gains from comparative advantage. However, principals may also delegate tasks to avoid taking direct responsibility for selfish or unethical behavior. We report three labora...

The Gender Wage Gap and Domestic Violence

By Anna Aizer

American Economic Review, September 2010

Three quarters of all violence against women is perpetrated by domestic partners. This study exploits exogenous changes in the demand for labor in female-dominated industries to estimate the impact of the male-female wage gap on domestic violence. Decreas...

Constrained School Choice: An Experimental Study

By Caterina Calsamiglia, Guillaume Haeringer, and Flip Klijn

American Economic Review, September 2010

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Su...

Financing Development: The Role of Information Costs

By Jeremy Greenwood, Juan M. Sanchez, and Cheng Wang

American Economic Review, September 2010

To address how technological progress in financial intermediation affects the economy, a costly-state verification framework is embedded into the standard growth model. The framework has two novel ingredients. First, firms differ in the risk/return combin...

Efficiency Gains from Team-Based Coordination—Large-Scale Experimental Evidence

By Francesco Feri, Bernd Irlenbusch, and Matthias Sutter

American Economic Review, September 2010

The need for efficient coordination is ubiquitous in organizations and industries. The literature on the determinants of efficient coordination has focused on individual decision making so far. In reality, however, teams often have to coordinate with othe...

Social Identity and Preferences

By Daniel J. Benjamin, James J. Choi, and A. Joshua Strickland

American Economic Review, September 2010

Social identities prescribe behaviors for people. We identify the marginal behavioral effect of these norms on discount rates and risk aversion by measuring how laboratory subjects' choices change when an aspect of social identity is made salient. When we...

Bidding with Securities: Comment

By Yeon-Koo Che and Jinwoo Kim

American Economic Review, September 2010

Peter DeMarzo, Ilan Kremer, and Andrzej Skrzypacz (2005) analyzed auctions in which bidders compete in securities. They show that a steeper security leads to a higher expected revenue for the seller, and also use this to establish the revenue ranking betw...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

The Macroeconomic Costs and Benefits of the EMU and Other Monetary Unions: An Overview of Recent Research

By Roel Beetsma and Massimo Giuliodori

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

This article provides an overview of recent research into the macroeconomic costs and benefits of monetary unification. We are primarily interested in Europe's monetary union. Given that unification entails the loss of a policy instrument, its potential ...

Services Trade and Policy

By Joseph Francois and Bernard Hoekman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

A substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services since the mid-1980s. Much of this is inspired by the WTO and regional trade agreements. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberali...

Consumption and Saving: Models of Intertemporal Allocation and Their Implications for Public Policy

By Orazio P. Attanasio and Guglielmo Weber

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

This paper provides a critical survey of the large literature on the life cycle model of consumption, both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view. It discusses several approaches that have been taken in the literature to bring the model to the ...

A Review of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast's Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History

By Robert Bates

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

In Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast probe the organizational foundations of development. Outlining the properties of the "natu...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

Factor Immobility and Regional Impacts of Trade Liberalization: Evidence on Poverty from India

By Petia Topalova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

This paper uses the 1991 Indian trade liberalization to measure the impact of trade liberalization on poverty, and to examine the mechanisms underpinning this impact. Variation in sectoral composition across districts and liberalization intensity across p...

Trade Adjustment and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from Indian Tariff Reform

By Eric V. Edmonds, Nina Pavcnik, and Petia Topalova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

Does trade policy influence schooling and child labor in low-income countries? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. While schooling increased and child labor declined in rural India in the 1990s, these trends are attenua...

Beyond Signaling and Human Capital: Education and the Revelation of Ability

By Peter Arcidiacono, Patrick Bayer, and Aurel Hizmo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

We provide evidence that college graduation plays a direct role in revealing ability to the labor market. Using the NLSY79, our results suggest that ability is observed nearly perfectly for college graduates, but is revealed to the labor market more gradu...

The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization on Corporate Hierarchies

By Maria Guadalupe and Julie Wulf

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

This paper establishes a causal effect of product market competition on various characteristics of organizational design. Using a unique panel dataset on firm hierarchies of large US firms (1986-1999) and a quasi-natural experiment (trade liberalization)...