Amy Finkelstein: 2012 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Jonathan Levin and James Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Amy Finkelstein is the 2012 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. The core concerns of Amy's research program have been insurance markets and health care. She has addressed whether asymmetric information leads to ...

Retrospectives: Irving Fisher's Appreciation and Interest (1896) and the Fisher Relation

By Robert W. Dimand and Rebeca Gomez Betancourt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Irving Fisher's monograph Appreciation and Interest (1896) proposed his famous equation showing expected inflation as the difference between nominal interest and real interest rates. In addition, he drew attention to insightful remarks and numerical examp...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2012

Including: David A. Wise: Distinguished Fellow 2011

The Spending and Debt Response to Minimum Wage Hikes

By Daniel Aaronson, Sumit Agarwal, and Eric French

American Economic Review, December 2012

Immediately following a minimum wage hike, household income rises on average by about $250 per quarter and spending by roughly $700 per quarter for households with minimum wage workers. Most of the spending response is caused by a small number of house...

Offshoring and the Role of Trade Agreements

By Pol Antràs and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, December 2012

The rise of offshoring of intermediate inputs raises important questions for commercial policy. Do the distinguishing features of offshoring introduce novel reasons for trade policy intervention? Does offshoring create new problems of global policy coo...

Information and Employee Evaluation: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Public Schools

By Jonah E. Rockoff, Douglas O. Staiger, Thomas J. Kane, and Eric S. Taylor

American Economic Review, December 2012

We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with impe...

Pricing and Welfare in Health Plan Choice

By M. Kate Bundorf, Jonathan Levin, and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, December 2012

Premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs, either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated. This creates inefficiencies when consumers self-select into plans. We ...

Diagnosing Consumer Confusion and Sub-optimal Shopping Effort: Theory and Mortgage-Market Evidence

By Susan E. Woodward and Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, December 2012

Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to...

Lost in Transit: Product Replacement Bias and Pricing to Market

By Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson

American Economic Review, December 2012

In the microdata underlying US trade price indexes, 40 percent of products are replaced before a single price change is observed and 70 percent are replaced after two price changes or fewer. A price index that focuses on price changes for identical ite...

Imperfect Public Monitoring with Costly Punishment: An Experimental Study

By Attila Ambrus and Ben Greiner

American Economic Review, December 2012

This paper experimentally investigates the effects of a costly punishment option on cooperation and social welfare in long, finitely repeated public good contribution games. In a perfect monitoring environment, increasing the severity of the potential p...

Estimating Time Preferences from Convex Budgets

By James Andreoni and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Review, December 2012

Experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what seems reasonable for economic decision-making. Such high rates are often attributed to present-biased discounting. A well-known bias of standard measurements is the assumption of li...

Risk Preferences Are Not Time Preferences

By James Andreoni and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Review, December 2012

Risk and time are intertwined. The present is known while the future is inherently risky. This is problematic when studying time preferences since uncontrolled risk can generate apparently present-biased behavior. We systematically manipulate risk in a...

Married with Children: A Collective Labor Supply Model with Detailed Time Use and Intrahousehold Expenditure Information

By Laurens Cherchye, Bram De Rock, and Frederic Vermeulen

American Economic Review, December 2012

We propose a collective labor supply model with household production that generalizes a model of Blundell, Chiappori, and Meghir (2005). Adults' preferences depend not only on own leisure and individual private consumption of market goods. They also dep...

Exports, Export Destinations, and Skills

By Irene Brambilla, Daniel Lederman, and Guido Porto

American Economic Review, December 2012

This paper explores the links between exports, export destinations, and skill utilization. We identify two mechanisms behind these links: differences across destinations in quality valuation and in exporting required services, activities that are inten...

Who Matters in Coordination Problems?

By József Sákovics and Jakub Steiner

American Economic Review, December 2012

Agents face a coordination problem akin to the adoption of a network technology. A principal announces investment subsidies that, at minimal cost, attain a given likelihood of successful coordination. Optimal subsidies target agents who impose high ext...

Loss Leading as an Exploitative Practice

By Zhijun Chen and Patrick Rey

American Economic Review, December 2012

We show that large retailers, competing with smaller stores that carry a narrower range, can exercise market power by pricing below cost some of the products also offered by the smaller rivals, in order to discriminate multistop shoppers from one-stop ...

Human Capital Prices, Productivity, and Growth

By Audra J. Bowlus and Chris Robinson

American Economic Review, December 2012

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in economics. Price and quantity series are derived for four education levels. The price series are highly correlated and they ex...