Law, Regulation, and the Business Climate: The Nature and Influence of the World Bank Doing Business Project

[Symposium: Doing Business]

By Timothy Besley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

The importance of a well-functioning legal and regulatory system in creating an effective market economy is now widely accepted. One flagship project that tries to measure the environment in which businesses operate in countries across the world is the ...

How Business Is Done in the Developing World: Deals versus Rules

[Symposium: Doing Business]

By Mary Hallward-Driemeier and Lant Pritchett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

What happens in the developing world when stringent regulations characterizing the investment climate meet weak government willingness or capability to enforce those regulations? How is business actually done? The Doing Business project surveys expert...

The Microeconomic Dimensions of the Eurozone Crisis and Why European Politics Cannot Solve Them

By Christian Thimann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

The academic and policy debate about the crisis in Europe's single currency area is usually dominated by macroeconomic and public sector considerations. The microeconomic dimensions of the crisis and the private sector issues typically get much less att...

E-Books: A Tale of Digital Disruption

By Richard J. Gilbert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

E-book sales surged after Amazon introduced the Kindle e-reader at the end of 2007 and accounted for about one quarter of all trade book sales by the end of 2013. Amazon's aggressive (low) pricing of e-books led to allegations that e-books were bankrupt...

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and Its Effects on American Indian Economic Development

By Randall K. Q. Akee, Katherine A. Spilde, and Jonathan B. Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), passed by the US Congress in 1988, was a watershed in the history of policymaking directed toward reservation-resident American Indians. IGRA set the stage for tribal government-owned gaming facilities. It also sha...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

Editorial Note: Correction to Jeffrey B. Liebman's "Understanding the Increase in Disability Insurance Benefit Receipt in the United States"

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2015

Yours, Mine, and Ours: Do Divorce Laws Affect the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples?

By Alessandra Voena

American Economic Review, August 2015

This paper examines how divorce laws affect couples' intertemporal choices and well-being. Exploiting panel variation in US laws, I estimate the parameters of a model of household decision-making. Household survey data indicate that the introduction of un...

Country Solidarity in Sovereign Crises

By Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, August 2015

When will solidarity, which emerges spontaneously from the fear of spillovers, be reinforced through contracting? The optimal pact between countries that differ substantially in their probability of distress is a simple debt contract with market financing...

State Capacity and Economic Development: A Network Approach

By Daron Acemoglu, Camilo García-Jimeno, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, August 2015

We study the direct and spillover effects of local state capacity in Colombia. We model the determination of state capacity as a network game between municipalities and the national government. We estimate this model exploiting the municipality network an...

Crossing Party Lines: The Effects of Information on Redistributive Politics

By Katherine Casey

American Economic Review, August 2015

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candi...

Health Insurance for "Humans": Information Frictions, Plan Choice, and Consumer Welfare

By Benjamin R. Handel and Jonathan T. Kolstad

American Economic Review, August 2015

Traditional models of insurance choice are predicated on fully informed and rational consumers protecting themselves from exposure to financial risk. In practice, choosing an insurance plan is a complicated decision often made without full information. In...

Evaluating Behaviorally Motivated Policy: Experimental Evidence from the Lightbulb Market

By Hunt Allcott and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Review, August 2015

Imperfect information and inattention to energy costs are important potential motivations for energy efficiency standards and subsidies. We evaluate these motivations in the lightbulb market using a theoretical model and two randomized experiments. We der...

No Taxation without Information: Deterrence and Self-Enforcement in the Value Added Tax

By Dina Pomeranz

American Economic Review, August 2015

Claims that the VAT facilitates tax enforcement by generating paper trails on transactions between firms contributed to widespread VAT adoption worldwide, but there is surprisingly little evidence. This paper analyzes the role of third-party information f...

Back to Fundamentals: Equilibrium in Abstract Economies

By Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein

American Economic Review, August 2015

We propose a new abstract definition of equilibrium in the spirit of competitive equilibrium: a profile of alternatives and a public ordering (expressing prestige, price, or a social norm) such that each agent prefers his assigned alternative to all lower...

On Discrimination in Auctions with Endogenous Entry

By Philippe Jehiel and Laurent Lamy

American Economic Review, August 2015

When entry is exogenous, strong buyers should be discriminated against weak buyers to maximize revenues (Myerson 1981). When entry is endogenous so that entrants' expected payoffs do not depend on the proposed mechanism, optimal discrimination takes a com...

Information Rigidity and the Expectations Formation Process: A Simple Framework and New Facts

By Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Review, August 2015

We propose a new approach to test the full-information rational expectations hypothesis which can identify whether rejections of the null arise from information rigidities. This approach quantifies the economic significance of departures from the null and...

How to Control Controlled School Choice

By Federico Echenique and M. Bumin Yenmez

American Economic Review, August 2015

We characterize choice rules for schools that regard students as substitutes while expressing preferences for a diverse student body. The stable (or fair) assignment of students to schools requires the latter to regard the former as substitutes. Such a re...