Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy

By Steven P. Lalley and E. Glen Weyl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Can mechanism design save democracy? We propose a simple design that offers a chance: individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" in the votes they buy. Only quadratic cost induces marginal costs linear in votes purcha...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap? The Effect of Plan-Making Prompts on Job Search and Employment

By Martin Abel, Rulof Burger, Eliana Carranza, and Patrizio Piraino

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

The paper tests the effects of plan making on job search and employment. In a field experiment with unemployed youths, participants who complete a detailed job search plan increase the number of job applications submitted (by 15 percent) but not the time ...

Monopoly Power and Endogenous Product Variety: Distortions and Remedies

By Florin O. Bilbiie, Fabio Ghironi, and Marc J. Melitz

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

The inefficiencies related to endogenous product creation and variety under monopolistic competition are two-fold: one static—the misalignment between consumers and producers regarding the value of a new variety; and one dynamic—time variation in mark...

Measuring Progress: A Review Essay on The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life by Eli Cook

By Diane Coyle

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

There is growing interest in the history of economic statistics, and Eli Cook has provided in The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life a fascinating account of the era of economic measurement prior to...

Evaluating Strategic Forecasters

By Rahul Deb, Mallesh M. Pai, and Maher Said

American Economic Review, October 2018

Motivated by the question of how one should evaluate professional election forecasters, we study a novel dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. A principal who wishes to hire only high-quality forecasters is faced with an agent of unknown qua...

A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Applications

By Camille Landais, Pascal Michaillat, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

In the United States, unemployment insurance (UI) is more generous when unemployment is high. This paper examines whether this policy is desirable. The optimal UI replacement rate is the Baily-Chetty replacement rate plus a correction term measuring the e...

Fighting Bundles: The Effects of Competition on Second-Degree Price Discrimination

By Andre Boik and Hidenori Takahashi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

We study how changes in market structure affect how firms engage in second-degree price discrimination. Specifically, we study how a large incumbent cable firm changes its menu of price-quality offerings and mixed bundles in response to entry. Competition...

Attainment Effects of Student Loans and Pell Grants

By Benjamin M. Marx and Lesley J. Turner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We estimate attainment effects of financial aid at a large community college. Using variation from a field experiment that altered how the college presented loans and a discontinuity in the Pell Grant formula, we separately identify the effects of grant a...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

The Limits to Partial Banking Unions: A Political Economy Approach

By Dana Foarta

American Economic Review, April 2018

This paper studies the welfare effects of a "partial banking union" in which cross-country transfers for bailouts are set at the supranational level, but policymakers in member countries decide the distribution of funds. This allows the self-interested po...

International Reserves and Rollover Risk

By Javier Bianchi, Juan Carlos Hatchondo, and Leonardo Martinez

American Economic Review, September 2018

We study the optimal accumulation of international reserves in a quantitative model of sovereign default with long-term debt and a risk-free asset. Keeping higher levels of reserves provides a hedge against rollover risk, but this is costly because using ...

The Welfare Impact of Second-Best Uniform-Pigouvian Taxation: Evidence from Transportation

By Christopher R. Knittel and Ryan Sandler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

When consumers or firms don't face the true social cost of their actions, market outcomes are inefficient. In the case of negative externalities, Pigouvian taxes are one way to correct this market failure, but it may be infeasible to tax the externality d...

Ownership, Concentration, and Investment

By Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The US business sector has underinvested relative to profits, funding costs, and Tobin's Q since the early 2000s. Building on prior work, we argue that decreasing competition, rising intangibles, and tightening governance explain, respectively, about one-...

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Report: Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Professional Conduct

By Marianne Bertrand

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

(Mis)Allocation, Market Power, and Global Oil Extraction

By John Asker, Allan Collard-Wexler, and Jan De Loecker

American Economic Review, April 2019

We propose an approach to measuring the misallocation of production in a market that compares actual industry cost curves to undistorted (counterfactual) supply curves. As compared to traditional, TFPR-based, misallocation measures, this approach leverage...

The Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth

By Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We present new evidence on global inequality and growth since 1980 using the World and Wealth Income Database. We plot the curve of cumulated growth from 1980 to 2016 by percentile of the global distribution of income per adult. This curve has an elephant...

US Water Pollution Regulation over the Past Half Century: Burning Waters to Crystal Springs?

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By David A. Keiser and Joseph S. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In the half century since the founding of the US Environmental Protection Agency, public and private US sources have spent nearly $5 trillion ($2017) to provide clean rivers, lakes, and drinking water (annual spending of 0.8 percent of US GDP in most ye...

Some Evidence on Secular Drivers of US Safe Real Rates

By Kurt G. Lunsford and Kenneth D. West

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

We study long-run correlations between safe real interest rates in the United States and over 30 variables that have been hypothesized to influence real rates. The list of variables is motivated by an intertermporal IS equation, by models of aggregate s...