A Behavioral Model of the Popularity and Regulation of Demandable Liabilities

By Julio J. Rotemberg

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Overoptimism regarding one's ability to arrive early in a queue is shown to rationalize deposit contracts in which people can withdraw their funds on demand even if consumption takes place later. Capitalized institutions serving overoptimistic depositors ...

Interest Rates, Leverage, and Business Cycles in Emerging Economies: The Role of Financial Frictions

By Andrés Fernández and Adam Gulan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Countercyclical country interest rates have been shown to be an important characteristic of business cycles in emerging markets. In this paper we provide a microfounded rationale for this pattern by linking interest rate spreads to the dynamics of corpora...

The Economic and Demographic Transition, Mortality, and Comparative Development

By Matteo Cervellati and Uwe Sunde

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

This paper develops a quantifiable unified growth theory to investigate cross-country comparative development. The calibrated model can replicate the historical development dynamics in forerunner countries like Sweden and the patterns in cross-country pan...

The Missing Food Problem: Trade, Agriculture, and International Productivity Differences

By Trevor Tombe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Agriculture in poor countries has low productivity, high employment, and negligible trade flows relative to other sectors. These facts motivate a multisector, open-economy view of international productivity differences. With a quantitative multicountry mo...

Structural Change, Growth, and Volatility

By Alessio Moro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

I construct a two-sector general equilibrium model of structural change to study the impact of sectoral composition of gross domestic product (GDP) on cross-country differences in GDP growth and volatility. For an empirically relevant parametrization of s...

A New History of Banking Panics in the United States, 1825-1929: Construction and Implications

By Andrew J. Jalil

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

There are two major problems in identifying the output effects of banking panics of the pre-Great Depression era. First, it is not clear when panics occurred because prior panic series differ in their identification of panic episodes. Second, establishing...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Pricing and Efficiency in the Market for IP Addresses

By Benjamin Edelman and Michael Schwarz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We consider market rules for transferring IP addresses, numeric identifiers required by all computers connected to the Internet. Transfers usefully move resources from lowest- to highest-valuation networks, but transfers tend to cause socially costly grow...

What Makes Them Click: Empirical Analysis of Consumer Demand for Search Advertising

By Przemyslaw Jeziorski and Ilya Segal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We study users' responses to sponsored-search advertising using consumer-level data from Microsoft Live. We document that users click ads in a nonsequential order and that the click through rates depend on the identity of competing ads. We estimate a dyna...

Collusion and the Organization of the Firm

By Alfredo Burlando and Alberto Motta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

This paper shows that the threat of collusion between a productive agent and the auditor in charge of monitoring production can influence a number of organizational dimensions of the firm, including outsourcing decisions and the allocation of productio...

Cyber-Shilling in Automobile Auctions: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By David Grether, David Porter, and Matthew Shum

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We run a large field experiment with an online company specializing in selling used automobiles via ascending auctions. We manipulate experimentally the "price grid," or the possible amounts that bidders can bid above the current standing price. Using two...

Net Neutrality, Business Models, and Internet Interconnection

By Jay Pil Choi, Doh-Shin Jeon, and Byung-Cheol Kim

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We analyze the effect of net neutrality regulation in a two-sided market framework when content is heterogeneous in its sensitivity to delivery quality. We characterize the equilibrium in a neutral network constrained to offer the same quality vis-à-vis ...

Achieving Cooperation under Privacy Concerns

By Wioletta Dziuda and Ronen Gradwohl

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

Two players choose whether to cooperate on a project. Each of them is endowed with some evidence, and if both possess a sufficient amount, then cooperation is profitable. In order to facilitate cooperation, the players reveal evidence to one another. Howe...

Referrals: Peer Screening and Enforcement in a Consumer Credit Field Experiment

By Gharad Bryan, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

Empirical evidence on peer intermediation lags behind both theory and practice in which lenders use peers to mitigate adverse selection and moral hazard. Using a referral incentive under individual liability, we develop a two-stage field experiment that p...

Antitrust Leniency with Multiproduct Colluders

By Leslie M. Marx, Claudio Mezzetti, and Robert C. Marshall

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We use a global games approach to model alternative implementations of an antitrust leniency program as applied to multiproduct colluders. We derive several policy design lessons; e.g., we show that it is possible that linking leniency across products inc...

Two-Sided Matching with Endogenous Preferences

By Yair Antler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We modify the stable matching problem by allowing agents' preferences to depend on the endogenous actions of agents on the other side of the market. Conventional matching theory results break down in the modified setup. In particular, every game that is i...

Selling Cookies

By Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We propose a model of data provision and data pricing. A single data provider controls a large database that contains information about the match value between individual consumers and individual firms (advertisers). Advertisers seek to tailor their spend...

Evolution of Impatience: The Example of the Farmer-Sheriff Game

By David K. Levine, Salvatore Modica, Federico Weinschelbaum, and Felipe Zurita

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

The literature on the evolution of impatience, focusing on one-person decision problems, often finds that evolutionary forces favor the more patient individuals. This paper shows that in games where equilibrium involves threat of punishment there are forc...

Formal Contracts, Relational Contracts, and the Threat-Point Effect

By Hideshi Itoh and Hodaka Morita

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We investigate whether formal contracts can help in resolving the holdup problem by studying repeated transactions between a seller and a buyer. Contrary to previous findings, we demonstrate that a simple fixed-price contract based on product delivery is ...

When Is It Optimal to Delegate: The Theory of Fast-Track Authority

By Levent Celik, Bilgehan Karabay, and John McLaren

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

With fast-track authority (FTA), the US Congress delegates trade policy authority to the president by committing not to amend a trade agreement. Why would it cede such power? We suggest an interpretation in which Congress uses FTA to forestall destructive...