Marriage Networks, Nepotism, and Labor Market Outcomes in China

By Shing-Yi Wang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

This paper considers the role of marriage in improving labor market outcomes through the expansion of an individual's networks. I focus on the impact of the relationship with the father-in-law on a young man's career using panel data from China. The id...

Private Information and the Allocation of Land Use Subsidies in Malawi

By B. Kelsey Jack

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Efficient targeting of public programs is difficult when the cost or benefit to potential recipients is private information. This study illustrates the potential of self-selection to improve allocational outcomes in the context of a program that subsid...

A Female Style in Corporate Leadership? Evidence from Quotas

By David A. Matsa and Amalia R. Miller

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

This paper studies the impact of gender quotas for corporate board seats on corporate decisions. We examine the introduction of Norway's 2006 quota, comparing affected firms to other Nordic companies, public and private, that are unaffected by the rule...

Campaign Contributions over CEOs' Careers

By Adam Fremeth, Brian Kelleher Richter, and Brandon Schaufele

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Individuals dominate money in politics, accounting for over 90 percent of campaign contributions, yet studies of drivers of individuals' giving are scarce. We analyze data on all contributions made between 1991 and 2008 by all 1,556 people who became S...

Teaching Practices and Social Capital

By Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

In cross-country data, teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are related to various dimensions of social capital. In micro-data from three datasets, teaching practices are also strongly correlated with ...

Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren

By Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home comput...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Detecting Learning by Exporting

By Jan De Loecker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

Learning by exporting refers to the mechanism whereby a firm's performance improves after entering export markets. This mechanism is often mentioned in policy documents, but many econometric studies have not found corroborating evidence. I show that th...

Platform Competition under Asymmetric Information

By Hanna Halaburda and Yaron Yehezkel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

We consider platform competition in a two-sided market, where the two sides (buyers and sellers) have ex-ante uncertainty and ex-post asymmetric information concerning the value of a new technology. We find that platform competition may lead to a market...

Homophily in Peer Groups

By Mariagiovanna Baccara and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. In our model agents choose peers before making contributions to public projects, and they differ in how much they value one project relative to another. Thus, the group's preference compo...

Collusion with Asymmetric Retailers: Evidence from a Gasoline Price-Fixing Case

By Robert Clark and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

We point out a fundamental difficulty of successfully colluding in retail markets with heterogeneous firms, and characterize the mechanism recent gasoline cartels in Canada used to sustain collusion. Heterogeneity in cost and network size necessitates...

Contracts for Agents with Biased Beliefs: Some Theory and an Experiment

By Anja Sautmann

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

This paper experimentally tests the predictions of a principal-agent model in which the agent has biased beliefs about his ability. Overconfident workers are found to earn lower wages than underconfident ones because they overestimate their expected pa...

Too Far Away? The Effect of Distance to Headquarters on Business Establishment Performance

By Arturs Kalnins and Francine Lafontaine

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

In the population of over 1.7 million Texan sales-tax collecting business establishments, we show that greater distance to owner headquarters is associated with shorter establishment longevity. For the lodging industry, where we have revenue data, inc...

Behavioral Welfare Economics and Redistribution

By Marc Fleurbaey and Erik Schokkaert

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

Behavioral economics has shaken the view that individuals have well-defined, consistent and stable preferences. This raises a challenge for welfare economics, which takes as a key postulate that individual preferences should be respected. We argue, in ...

Pricing Payment Cards

By Özlem Bedre-Defolie and Emilio Calvano

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

Payment card networks, such as Visa, require merchants' banks to pay substantial "interchange" fees to cardholders' banks, on a per transaction basis. This paper shows that a network's profit-maximizing fee induces an inefficient price structure, over...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

What Does Health Reform Mean for the Health Care Industry? Evidence from the Massachusetts Special Senate Election

By Mohamad M. Al-Ississ and Nolan H. Miller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We exploit the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown to the US Senate to evaluate the market's assessment of the impact of the recent US health reform legislation on the health care industry. We find that Brown's election was associated with abnorma...

The Welfare Effects of Misperceived Product Costs: Data and Calibrations from the Automobile Market

By Hunt Allcott

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

This analysis exploits new data from the Vehicle Ownership and Alternatives Survey, which elicits beliefs over the financial benefits of owning higher fuel economy vehicles. The data are used to test for underestimation and to document evidence of "MPG Il...

Beyond Work Ethic: Religion, Individual, and Political Preferences

By Christoph Basten and Frank Betz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experime...

Driving under the (Cellular) Influence

By Saurabh Bhargava and Vikram S. Pathania

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We investigate the causal link between driver cell phone use and crash rates by exploiting a natural experiment induced by the 9 pm price discontinuity that characterizes a majority of recent cellular plans. We first document a 7.2 percent jump in driver ...