Are Female Supervisors More Female-Friendly?

By Steven Bednar and Dora Gicheva

American Economic Review, May 2014

We introduce the idea that easily inferable demographic characteristics such as gender may not be sufficient to define type in the supervisor-employee mentoring relationship. We use longitudinal data on athletic directors at NCAA Division I programs to id...

Race and Marriage in the Labor Market: A Discrimination Correspondence Study in a Developing Country

By Eva O. Arceo-Gomez and Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez

American Economic Review, May 2014

In Mexico, as in most Latin American countries with indigenous populations, it is commonly believed that European phenotypes are preferred to mestizo or indigenous phenotypes. However, it is hard to test for such racial biases in the labor market using of...

The Declining Fortunes of the Young since 2000

By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand

American Economic Review, May 2014

We document that successive cohorts of college and post-college degree graduates experienced an increase in the probability of obtaining cognitive jobs both at the start of their careers and with time in the labor market in the 1990s. However, this patter...

Trends in Earnings Differentials across College Majors and the Changing Task Composition of Jobs

By Joseph G. Altonji, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jamin D. Speer

American Economic Review, May 2014

We show that, among college graduates, earnings differentials across field of study have increased substantially since the early 1990s. We study the degree to which this increase can be accounted for by changes in the labor market return to skills associa...

Return of the Solow Paradox? IT, Productivity, and Employment in US Manufacturing

By Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, and Brendan Price

American Economic Review, May 2014

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using US manufac...

Ability-Tracking, Instructional Time, and Better Pedagogy: The Effect of Double-Dose Algebra on Student Achievement

By Kalena E. Cortes and Joshua S. Goodman

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper provides new evidence on tracking by studying an innovative curriculum implemented by Chicago Public Schools (CPS). In 2003, CPS enacted a double-dose algebra policy requiring 9th grade students with 8th grade math scores below the national med...

Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness

By David J. Deming

American Economic Review, May 2014

Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness. Yet, random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of VAMs and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools. In this pap...

Gender and Race Heterogeneity: The Impact of Students with Limited English on Native Students' Performance

By Timothy M. Diette and Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere

American Economic Review, May 2014

Recent evidence suggests that exposure to a larger share of Limited English (LE) students is associated with a slight decline in performance for students at the top of the achievement distribution. In this paper we explore whether LE peer effects differ b...

Implementation Details for Frequent Batch Auctions: Slowing Down Markets to the Blink of an Eye

By Eric Budish, Peter Cramton, and John Shim

American Economic Review, May 2014

Our recent research (Budish, Cramton, and Shim 2013) proposes frequent batch auctions—uniform-price sealed-bid double auctions conducted at frequent but discrete time intervals—as a market design alternative to continuous-time trading in finan...

Getting More Organs for Transplantation

By Judd B. Kessler and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, May 2014

Organs for transplantation are a scarce resource. Paying to increase the supply of organs is illegal in much of the world. We review efforts to increase transplantation by increasing the supply of available organs from living and deceased donors. Progress...

Mechanism Design in Large Games: Incentives and Privacy

By Michael Kearns, Mallesh M. Pai, Aaron Roth, and Jonathan Ullman

American Economic Review, May 2014

We study the design of mechanisms satisfying a novel desideratum: privacy. This requires the mechanism not reveal "much" about any agent's type to other agents. We propose the notion of joint differential privacy: a variant of differential privacy used in...

Investment Incentives in Labor Market Matching

By John William Hatfield, Fuhito Kojima, and Scott Duke Kominers

American Economic Review, May 2014

We provide an illustration of how the design of labor market clearing mechanisms can affect incentives for human capital acquisition. Specifically, we extend the labor market matching model (with discrete transfers) of Kelso and Crawford (1982) to incorpo...

The VCG Auction in Theory and Practice

By Hal R. Varian and Christopher Harris

American Economic Review, May 2014

We describe two auction forms for search engine advertising and present two simple theoretical results concerning i) the estimation of click-through rates and ii) how to adjust the auctions for broad match search. We also describe some of the practical is...

Market Design and the Evolution of the Combinatorial Clock Auction

By Lawrence M. Ausubel and Oleg V. Baranov

American Economic Review, May 2014

The Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA) is an important recent innovation in auction design which has been adopted for many spectrum auctions worldwide. Since its inception, the CCA has been in almost continual evolution. We begin by reviewing some importan...

The Continuous Combinatorial Auction Architecture

By Charles R. Plott, Hsing-Yang Lee, and Travis Maron

American Economic Review, May 2014

The paper reports the architecture of a continuous combinatorial auction. Preferences are based on sets of items and feasibility requires the nonintersection of sets. Countdown clocks replace eligibility and activity requirements typical of rounds-based a...

Costly Persuasion

By Matthew Gentzkow and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Review, May 2014

We study the design of informational environments in settings where generating information is costly. We assume that the cost of a signal is proportional to the expected reduction in uncertainty. We show that Kamenica & Gentzkow's (2011) concavification a...

How Sharing Information Can Garble Experts' Advice

By Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, and Andrei Kirilenko

American Economic Review, May 2014

We model the strategic provision of advice in environments where a principal's optimal action depends on an unobserved, binary state of interest. Experts receive signals about the state and each recommends an action. The principal and all experts dislike ...

Interim Bayesian Persuasion: First Steps

By Eduardo Perez-Richet

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper makes a first attempt at building a theory of interim Bayesian persuasion. I work in a minimalist model where a low or high type sender seeks validation from a receiver who is willing to validate high types exclusively. After learning her type,...

Mobile Computing: The Next Platform Rivalry

By Timothy Bresnahan and Shane Greenstein

American Economic Review, May 2014

Competition to become one of several dominant mobile platforms is intense. Platforms compete for developers, who create applications which make the platform valuable for users. Why doesn't one form of platform governance emerge as superior? This essay wil...

Trading Dollars for Dollars: The Price of Attention Online and Offline

By Matthew Gentzkow

American Economic Review, May 2014

Popular accounts suggest that advertising revenue per unit of consumer attention is lower online than offline, and has fallen in traditional media as the Internet has made advertising markets more competitive. I assess these claims theoretically and empir...