The Contingent Valuation Debate: Why Economists Should Care

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By Paul R. Portney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

The contingent valuation method, wherein sample surveys are used to elicit individuals' willingness to pay for certain types of policies, is playing an important role in government decision-making. The most prominent applications are in the valuation of d...

The Impact of Attending a School with High-Achieving Peers: Evidence from the New York City Exam Schools

By Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

This paper uses data from three prominent exam high schools in New York City to estimate the impact of attending a school with high-achieving peers on college enrollment and graduation. Our identification strategy exploits sharp discontinuities in the adm...

Corporate Finance and the Legacy of Miller and Modigliani

By Sudipto Bhattacharya

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

[This is a comment on "The Modigliani-Miller Propositions after Thirty Years" by Merton H. Miller in this same issue.] The influence of the Modigliani-Miller (1958) propositions on capital structure and the Miller-Modigliani (1961) theses on dividend poli...

Cross-Country Evidence on the Relationship between Overwork and Skilled Women's Job Choices

By Patricia Cortes and Jessica Pan

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines the relationship between the prevalence of overwork and skilled women's labor force participation and occupational choice. Using country-level variation, we find a negative relationship between the share of males working 50+ hours a we...

Can Informed Public Deliberation Overcome Clientelism? Experimental Evidence from Benin

By Thomas Fujiwara and Leonard Wantchekon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

This paper studies the electoral effects of town hall meetings based on programmatic, nonclientelist platforms. The experiment involves the cooperation of leading candidates in a presidential election in Benin. A campaign strategy based solely on these...

The Winner's Curse and Public Information in Common Value Auctions: Reply

By Colin M. Campbell, John H. Kagel, and Dan Levin

American Economic Review, March 1999

One Size Fits All? Heckscher-Ohlin Specialization in Global Production

By Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper introduces a new technique for testing the Heckscher-Ohlin model that allows for the possibility that countries with sufficiently disparate endowments specialize in unique subsets of goods. Results based upon industry-level data reject one-size...

The Case of the Missing Trade and Other Mysteries: Reply

By Daniel Trefler

American Economic Review, March 2002

Are Consumers Myopic? Evidence from New and Used Car Purchases

By Meghan R. Busse, Christopher R. Knittel, and Florian Zettelmeyer

American Economic Review, February 2013

We investigate whether car buyers are myopic about future fuel costs. We estimate the effect of gasoline prices on short-run equilibrium prices of cars of different fuel economies. We then compare the implied changes in willingness-to-pay to the associat...

Employment, Wages, and Voter Turnout

By Kerwin Kofi Charles and Melvin Stephens Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Using county-level data across several decades, and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that higher local wages and employment lower turnout in elections for governor, senator, US Congress and state House of Representatives, but have no effect on pres...

Rational Attention and Adaptive Coding: A Puzzle and a Solution

By Camillo Padoa-Schioppa and Aldo Rustichini

American Economic Review, May 2014

Adaptive Coding is the property of the brain to adjust its response to statistical properties of the environment. Its effect is an improved discrimination among signals under the constraints on the dynamic range of its response. It can thus be considered ...

Inventories and the Business Cycle: An Equilibrium Analysis of (S, s) Policies

By Aubhik Khan and Julia K. Thomas

American Economic Review, September 2007

We develop an equilibrium business cycle model where nonconvex delivery costs lead firms to follow (S, s) inventory policies. Calibrated to postwar US data, the model reproduces two-thirds of the cyclical variability of inventory investment. Moreover, ...

A Theory of Countercyclical Government Multiplier

By Pascal Michaillat

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2014

I develop a New Keynesian model in which a type of government multiplier doubles when unemployment rises from 5 percent to 8 percent. This multiplier indicates the additional number of workers employed when one worker is hired in the public sector. Gra...

ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition

By Gary E. Bolton and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, March 2000

We demonstrate that a simple model, constructed on the premise that people are motivated by both their pecuniary payoff and their relative payoff standing, organizes a large and seemingly disparate set of laboratory observations as one consistent pattern....

A Political Economy Model of Congressional Careers

By Daniel Diermeier, Michael Keane, and Antonio Merlo

American Economic Review, March 2005

Our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. We specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset. Given estimates of the structural model, we...

Health Care Exceptionalism? Performance and Allocation in the US Health Care Sector

By Amitabh Chandra, Amy Finkelstein, Adam Sacarny, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, August 2016

The conventional wisdom for the health care sector is that idiosyncratic features leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across several different conditions and performa...

Female Labor Supply: Why Is the United States Falling Behind?

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

American Economic Review, May 2013

In 1990, the US had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 OECD countries. By 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth. We find that the expansion of "family-friendly" policies, including parental leave and part-time work entitlements i...

The Hidden Costs of Control

By Armin Falk and Michael Kosfeld

American Economic Review, December 2006

We analyze the consequences of control on motivation in an experimental principalagent game, where the principal can control the agent by implementing a minimum performance requirement before the agent chooses a productive activity. Our results show th...

Trust as a Signal of a Social Norm and the Hidden Costs of Incentive Schemes

By Dirk Sliwka

American Economic Review, June 2007

An explanation for motivation crowding-out phenomena is developed in a social preferences framework. Besides selfish and fair or altruistic types, a third type of agent is introduced. These "conformists" have social preferences if they believe that suffic...

Inside the Refrigerator: Immigration Enforcement and Chilling Effects in Medicaid Participation

By Tara Watson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

"Chilling effects" are a popular explanation for low program take-up rates among immigrants, but the effects of an icy policy climate are inherently hard to measure. This paper finds robust evidence that heightened federal immigration enforcement reduces ...