Public Disagreement

By Rajiv Sethi and Muhamet Yildiz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

We develop a model of deliberation under heterogeneous beliefs and incomplete information, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the consequences of social integration. We show that when priors are corre...

Shopping Cost and Brand Exploration in Online Grocery

By Andrea Pozzi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

This paper compares consumers' brand exploration when shopping online versus in a brick-and-mortar store. I use a new scanner dataset to compare the behavior of households shopping online and in-store at the same chain, for identical items and prices. I f...

Religious Beliefs, Religious Participation, and Cooperation

By Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

We analyze the relation between religious beliefs, religious participation, and social cooperation. We focus on religions that instill beliefs about the connection between rewards and punishments and social behavior. We show how religious organizations a...

Competition and the Strategic Choices of Churches

By Adam D. Rennhoff and Mark F. Owens

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

We examine how the decisions of churches are impacted by the decisions of rival churches. Using a novel dataset, we estimate a model of strategic interaction, which accounts for the location and denomination of churches. We focus on a church's decision of...

Employee Initiative and Managerial Control

By Heikki Rantakari

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

I analyze the impact of managerial involvement and the allocation of authority on employee initiative in a setting where both a manager and an employee can originate new ideas for implementation. I show that employee initiative is maximized through the co...

Corrigendum: Ideologues Beat Idealists

By Sambuddha Ghosh and Vinayak Tripathi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

Distributive Politics and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Seven US State Legislatures

By Toke S. Aidt and Julia Shvets

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

We study the effect of electoral incentives on the allocation of public services across legislative districts. We develop a model in which elections encourage legislators to cater to parochial interests and thus aggravate the common pool problem. Using u...

Surviving the Global Financial Crisis: Foreign Ownership and Establishment Performance

By Laura Alfaro and Maggie Xiaoyang Chen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

We examine the differential response of establishments to the recent global financial crisis with particular emphasis on the role of foreign ownership. Using a worldwide establishment panel dataset, we investigate how multinational subsidiaries around the...

The Redistributional Impact of Nonlinear Electricity Pricing

By Severin Borenstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

Electricity regulators often mandate increasing-block pricing (IBP)—i.e., marginal price increases with the customer's average daily usage—to protect low-income households from rising costs. IBP has no cost basis, raising a classic conflict be...

Cracks in the Melting Pot: Immigration, School Choice, and Segregation

By Elizabeth U. Cascio and Ethan G. Lewis

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

We examine whether low-skilled immigration to the United States has contributed to immigrants' residential isolation by reducing native demand for public schools. We address endogeneity in school demographics using established Mexican settlement patterns ...

Does State Fiscal Relief during Recessions Increase Employment? Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Laura Feiveson, Zachary Liscow, and William Gui Woolston

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 included $88 billion of aid to state governments administered through the Medicaid reimbursement process. We examine the effect of these transfers on states' employment. Because state fiscal relief...

Fast-Track Authority and International Trade Negotiations

By Paola Conconi, Giovanni Facchini, and Maurizio Zanardi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

We develop a simple model of trade relations in which legislators with different stakes in import-competing and export industries decide whether to grant fast-track authority (FTA) to the president, giving up the power to amend international trade agreeme...

The Doctor Might See You Now: The Supply Side Effects of Public Health Insurance Expansions

By Craig L. Garthwaite

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

In the United States, public health insurance programs cover over 90 million individuals. Expansions of these programs, such as the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), may have large effects on physician behavior. This stud...

Check in the Mail or More in the Paycheck: Does the Effectiveness of Fiscal Stimulus Depend on How It Is Delivered?

By Claudia R. Sahm, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Joel Slemrod

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

Recent fiscal policies, including the 2008 stimulus payments and the 2009 Making Work Pay Tax Credit, aimed to increase household spending. This paper quantifies the spending response to these policies and examines differences in spending by whether the s...

Fiscal Spending Jobs Multipliers: Evidence from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

By Daniel J. Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

This paper estimates the "jobs multiplier" of fiscal stimulus spending using the state-level allocations of federal stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. Because the level and timing of stimulus funds that a state...

Corrigendum: Quantitative Effects of Fiscal Foresight

By Eric M. Leeper, Alexander W. Richter, and Todd B. Walker

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

A Search and Matching Approach to Labor Markets: Did the Natural Rate of Unemployment Rise?

[Symposium: Labor Markets and Unemployment]

By Mary C. Daly, Bart Hobijn, Ayşegül Şahin, and Robert G. Valletta

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

The U.S. unemployment rate has remained stubbornly high since the 2007-2009 recession, leading some observers to conclude that structural rather than cyclical factors are to blame. Relying on a standard job search and matching framework and empirical evid...

Who Suffers during Recessions?

[Symposium: Labor Markets and Unemployment]

By Hilary Hoynes, Douglas L. Miller, and Jessamyn Schaller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

In this paper, we examine how business cycles affect labor market outcomes in the United States. We conduct a detailed analysis of how cycles affect outcomes differentially across persons of differing age, education, race, and gender, and we compare the c...