Report: Ad Hoc Search Committee for the Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives

American Economic Review, May 2014

Report: Ad Hoc Search Committee for the Editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

American Economic Review, May 2014

Two Pillars of Asset Pricing

By Eugene F. Fama

American Economic Review, June 2014

Speculative Asset Prices

By Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, June 2014

Who Is (More) Rational?

By Syngjoo Choi, Shachar Kariv, Wieland Müller, and Dan Silverman

American Economic Review, June 2014

Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale experiment to test for consistency with utility maximization. Cons...

Tenure, Experience, Human Capital, and Wages: A Tractable Equilibrium Search Model of Wage Dynamics

By Jesper Bagger, François Fontaine, Fabien Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Marc Robin

American Economic Review, June 2014

We develop and estimate an equilibrium job search model of worker careers, allowing for human capital accumulation, employer heterogeneity and individual-level shocks. Wage growth is decomposed into contributions of human capital and job search, within a...

The Wage Effects of Offshoring: Evidence from Danish Matched Worker-Firm Data

By David Hummels, Rasmus Jørgensen, Jakob Munch, and Chong Xiang

American Economic Review, June 2014

We employ data that match the population of Danish workers to the universe of private-sector Danish firms, with product-level trade flows by origin- and destination-countries. We document new stylized facts about offshoring and instrument for offshoring...

US Food Aid and Civil Conflict

By Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in U.S. wheat production and cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any U.S. food ai...

The Size Distribution of Farms and International Productivity Differences

By Tasso Adamopoulos and Diego Restuccia

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the determinants of differences in farm-size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity using a quantitative sectoral model featuring a distribution of farms. Measured aggregate factors (capital, land, economy-w...

The Effect of Uncertainty on Investment: Evidence from Texas Oil Drilling

By Ryan Kellogg

American Economic Review, June 2014

This paper estimates the response of investment to changes in uncertainty using data on oil drilling in Texas and the expected volatility of the future price of oil. Using a dynamic model of firms' investment problem, I find that: (1) the response of dril...

Gift Exchange versus Monetary Exchange: Theory and Evidence

By John Duffy and Daniela Puzzello

American Economic Review, June 2014

We study the Lagos and Wright (2005) model of monetary exchange in the laboratory. With a finite population of sufficiently patient agents, this model has a unique monetary equilibrium and a continuum of non-monetary gift exchange equilibria, some of w...

Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling

By Melvin Stephens Jr. and Dou-Yan Yang

American Economic Review, June 2014

Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using U.S. state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes acro...

Evolutionary Origins of the Endowment Effect: Evidence from Hunter-Gatherers

By Coren L. Apicella, Eduardo M. Azevedo, Nicholas A. Christakis, and James H. Fowler

American Economic Review, June 2014

The endowment effect, the tendency to value possessions more than non-possessions, is a well known departure from rational choice and has been replicated in numerous settings. We investigate the universality of the endowment effect, its evolutionary sig...

Does Growing Up in a High Crime Neighborhood Affect Youth Criminal Behavior?

By Anna Piil Damm and Christian Dustmann

American Economic Review, June 2014

This paper investigates the effect of early exposure to neighborhood crime on subsequent criminal behavior of youth exploiting a unique natural experiment between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to neighborhoods quasi-rand...

Aid under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict

By Benjamin Crost, Joseph Felter, and Patrick Johnston

American Economic Review, June 2014

We estimate the causal effect of a large development program on conflict in the Philippines through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program. We find that barely eligible m...

Language, Meaning, and Games: A Model of Communication, Coordination, and Evolution: Comment

By Yuval Heller

American Economic Review, June 2014

Demichelis & Weibull (AER 2008) show that adding lexicographic lying costs to coordination games with cheap talk yields a sharp prediction: only the efficient outcome is evolutionarily stable. I show that this result is caused by the discontinuity of p...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2014

Independent Auditor's Report

American Economic Review, June 2014

The Choice between Formal and Informal Intellectual Property: A Review

By Bronwyn Hall, Christian Helmers, Mark Rogers, and Vania Sena

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at ...

Addressing Global Environmental Externalities: Transaction Costs Considerations

By Gary D. Libecap

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

Is there a way to understand why some global environmental externalities are addressed effectively, whereas others are not? The transaction costs of defining the property rights to mitigation benefits and costs is a useful framework for such analysis. Thi...