Microcredit Impacts: Evidence from a Randomized Microcredit Program Placement Experiment by Compartamos Banco

By Manuela Angelucci, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We use a clustered randomized trial, and over 16,000 household surveys, to estimate impacts at the community level from a group lending expansion at 110 percent APR by the largest microlender in Mexico. We find no evidence of transformative impacts on 37 ...

The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

By Britta Augsburg, Ralph De Haas, Heike Harmgart, and Costas Meghir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We use an RCT to analyze the impacts of microcredit. The study population consists of loan applicants who were marginally rejected by an MFI in Bosnia. A random subset of these were offered a loan. We provide evidence of higher self-employment, increases ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

Expanding "Choice" in School Choice

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Yeon-Koo Che, and Yosuke Yasuda

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance (henceforth DA) mechanism has emerged as a prominent candidate for placing students to public schools. While DA has desirable fairness and incentive properties, it limits the applicants' abilities to communicate their pr...

Sharp for SARP: Nonparametric Bounds on Counterfactual Demands

By Richard Blundell, Martin Browning, Laurens Cherchye, Ian Crawford, Bram De Rock, and Frederic Vermeulen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Sharp nonparametric bounds are derived for counterfactual demands and Hicksian compensating and equivalent variations. These "i-bounds" refine and extend earlier results of Blundell, Browning, and Crawford (2008). We show that their bounds are sharp under...

Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem with Incomplete Preferences

By Eric Danan, Thibault Gajdos, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We provide a generalization of Harsanyi's (1955) aggregation theorem to the case of incomplete preferences at the individual and social level. Individuals and society have possibly incomplete expected utility preferences that are represented by sets of ex...

Distributional Preferences, Reciprocity-Like Behavior, and Efficiency in Bilateral Exchange

By Daniel J. Benjamin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Under what conditions do distributional preferences, such as altruism or a concern for fair outcomes, generate efficient trade? I analyze theoretically a simple bilateral exchange game: each player sequentially takes an action that reduces his own materia...

Subjective Evaluations: Discretionary Bonuses and Feedback Credibility

By William Fuchs

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We provide a new rationale for the use of discretionary bonuses. In a setting with unknown match qualities between a worker and a firm and subjective evaluations by the principal, bonuses are useful in order to make the feedback from the firm to the worke...

Optimal Design of Trade Agreements in the Presence of Renegotiation

By Giovanni Maggi and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We study the optimal design of trade agreements when governments can renegotiate after the resolution of uncertainty but compensation between them is inefficient. In equilibrium, renegotiation always results in trade liberalization, not protection. The op...

The Core Matchings of Markets with Transfers

By Christopher P. Chambers and Federico Echenique

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We characterize the structure of the set of core matchings of an assignment game (a two-sided market with transfers). Such a set satisfies a property we call consistency. Consistency of a set of matchings states that, for any matching v, if, for each agen...

Information and Extremism in Elections

By Raphael Boleslavsky and Christopher Cotton

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We model an election in which parties nominate candidates with observable policy preferences prior to a campaign that produces information about candidate quality, a characteristic independent of policy. Informative campaigns lead to greater differentiati...

A Continuous-Time Model of Multilateral Bargaining

By Attila Ambrus and Shih En Lu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We propose a finite-horizon continuous-time framework for coalitional bargaining, in which players can make offers at random discrete times. In our model: (i) expected payoffs in Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) are unique, generating sharp predictions an...

Repeated Interaction and Rating Inflation: A Model of Double Reputation

By Sivan Frenkel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Credit rating agencies have an incentive to maintain a public reputation for credibility among investors but also have an incentive to develop a second, private reputation for leniency among issuers. We show that in markets with few issuers, such as marke...

Mobility and Conflict

By Sourav Bhattacharya, Joyee Deb, and Tapas Kundu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We study the role of intergroup mobility in the emergence of conflict. Two groups compete for the right to allocate society's resources. We allow for costly intergroup mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, which the opposition can accept or re...

Searching for a Bargain: Power of Strategic Commitment

By Selçuk Özyurt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

This paper shows that in a multilateral bargaining setting where the sellers compete á la Bertrand, a range of prices that includes the monopoly price and 0 are compatible with equilibrium, even in the limit where the reputational concerns and frictions ...

Corrigendum: Pride and Diversity in Social Economies

By Fabio Maccheroni, Massimo Marinacci, and Aldo Rustichini

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Inflation Expectations and Readiness to Spend: Cross-Sectional Evidence

By Rüdiger Bachmann, Tim O. Berg, and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

There have been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations to stimulate spending. We examine the relationship between expected inflation and spending attitudes using the microdata from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The i...

Taxes on the Internet: Deterrence Effects of Public Disclosure

By Erlend E. Bø, Joel Slemrod, and Thor O. Thoresen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

Although Norway has a long tradition of public disclosure of tax filings, starting in 2001 anyone with Internet access could obtain individual information on income and income taxes paid. We examine the effect on income reporting of this change in the deg...

Is There a Link between Foreclosure and Health?

By Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We investigate the relationship between foreclosures and hospital visits using data on all foreclosures and all hospital and emergency room visits from four states that were among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. We find that living in a neighbo...