Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2011

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2011

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2011

Including: Elhanan Helpman: Distinguished Fellow: 2010

Unemployment, Vacancies, Wages

By Peter Diamond

American Economic Review, June 2011

Markets with Search Friction and the DMP Model

By Dale T. Mortensen

American Economic Review, June 2011

Equilibrium in the Labor Market with Search Frictions

By Christopher A. Pissarides

American Economic Review, June 2011

The Role of Trading Frictions in Real Asset Markets

By Alessandro Gavazza

American Economic Review, June 2011

This paper investigates how trading frictions vary with the thickness of the asset market by examining patterns of asset allocations and prices in commercial aircraft markets. The empirical analysis indicates that assets with a thinner market are less ...

Read All about It!! What Happens Following a Technology Shock?

By Michelle Alexopoulos

American Economic Review, June 2011

Existing indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic act...

Choice Inconsistencies among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program

By Jason Abaluck and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, June 2011

We evaluate the choices of elders across their insurance options under the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug plan, using a unique dataset of prescription drug claims matched to information on the characteristics of choice sets. We document that elders ...

Participation

By Gary Charness and Martin Dufwenberg

American Economic Review, June 2011

We show experimentally that whether and how communication achieves beneficial social outcomes in a hidden-information context depends crucially on whether low-talent agents can participate in a Pareto-improving outcome. Communication is effective (and ...

What Do Trade Negotiators Negotiate About? Empirical Evidence from the World Trade Organization

By Kyle Bagwell and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, June 2011

According to the terms-of-trade theory, governments use trade agreements to escape from a terms-of-trade-driven prisoner's dilemma. We use the terms-of-trade theory to develop a relationship that predicts negotiated tariff levels on the basis of pre-ne...

Electoral Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from the Audits of Local Governments

By Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan

American Economic Review, June 2011

We show that political institutions affect corruption levels. We use audit reports in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent ...

R&D Investment, Exporting, and Productivity Dynamics

By Bee Yan Aw, Mark J. Roberts, and Daniel Yi Xu

American Economic Review, June 2011

This paper estimates a dynamic structural model of a producer's decision to invest in R&D and export, allowing both choices to endogenously affect the future path of productivity. Using plant-level data for the Taiwanese electronics industry, both acti...

Linking Conflict to Inequality and Polarization

By Joan Esteban and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, June 2011

In this paper we study a behavioral model of conflict that provides a basis for choosing certain indices of dispersion as indicators for conflict. We show that a suitable monotone transform of the equilibrium level of conflict can be proxied by a linea...

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 ...

Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives, and Evaluation

By Christopher A. Parsons, Johan Sulaeman, Michael C. Yates, and Daniel S. Hamermesh

American Economic Review, June 2011

Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers under...

The Inflation-Output Trade-Off with Downward Wage Rigidities

By Pierpaolo Benigno and Luca Antonio Ricci

American Economic Review, June 2011

The macroeconomic implications of downward nominal wage rigidities are analyzed via a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks. A closed-form solution for a long-run Phillips curve relates average output...

Education and Labor Market Discrimination

By Kevin Lang and Michael Manove

American Economic Review, June 2011

Using a model of statistical discrimination and educational sorting, we explain why blacks get more education than whites of similar cognitive ability, and we explore how the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), wages, and education are related. The...

Face Value

By Catherine C. Eckel and Ragan Petrie

American Economic Review, June 2011

People pay attention to the appearance of others, and personal characteristics can affect many types of decisions. We ask, is there informational value in a face in a situation where trust and reciprocity can increase earnings? We use a laboratory trust g...

Term Premia and Inflation Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from an International Panel Dataset

By Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Review, June 2011

This paper provides cross-country empirical evidence on term premia. I construct a panel of zero-coupon nominal government bond yields spanning ten industrialized countries and nearly two decades. I hence compute forward rates and use two different method...