Timing Decisions in Organizations: Communication and Authority in a Dynamic Environment

By Steven R. Grenadier, Andrey Malenko, and Nadya Malenko

American Economic Review, September 2016

We consider a problem where an uninformed principal makes a timing decision interacting with an informed but biased agent. Because time is irreversible, the direction of the bias crucially affects the agent's ability to credibly communicate information. W...

Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Markets Approach with Heterogeneous Firms

By Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato and Owen Zidar

American Economic Review, September 2016

This paper estimates the incidence of state corporate taxes on the welfare of workers, landowners, and firm owners using variation in state corporate tax rates and apportionment rules. We develop a spatial equilibrium model with imperfectly mobile firms a...

Runs on Money Market Mutual Funds

By Lawrence Schmidt, Allan Timmermann, and Russ Wermers

American Economic Review, September 2016

We study daily money market mutual fund flows at the individual share class level during September 2008. This fine granularity of data allows new insights into investor and portfolio holding characteristics conducive to run risk in cash-like asset pools. ...

Skill Transferability, Migration, and Development: Evidence from Population Resettlement in Indonesia

By Samuel Bazzi, Arya Gaduh, Alexander D. Rothenberg, and Maisy Wong

American Economic Review, September 2016

We use a natural experiment in Indonesia to provide causal evidence on the role of location-specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity. From 1979-1988, the Transmigration Program relocated two mill...

Asymmetric Information and Intermediation Chains

By Vincent Glode and Christian Opp

American Economic Review, September 2016

We propose a parsimonious model of bilateral trade under asymmetric information to shed light on the prevalence of intermediation chains that stand between buyers and sellers in many decentralized markets. Our model features a classic problem in economics...

How to Count Citations If You Must

By Motty Perry and Philip J. Reny

American Economic Review, September 2016

Citation indices are regularly used to inform critical decisions about promotion, tenure, and the allocation of billions of research dollars. Nevertheless, most indices (e.g., the h-index) are motivated by intuition and rules of thumb, resulting in undesi...

The Allocation of Future Business: Dynamic Relational Contracts with Multiple Agents

By Isaiah Andrews and Daniel Barron

American Economic Review, September 2016

We consider how a firm dynamically allocates business among several suppliers to motivate them in a relational contract. The firm chooses one supplier who exerts private effort. Output is non-contractible, and each supplier observes only his own relations...

A Behavioral Analysis of Stochastic Reference Dependence

By Yusufcan Masatlioglu and Collin Raymond

American Economic Review, September 2016

We examine the reference-dependent risk preferences of Koszegi and Rabin (2007), focusing on their choice-acclimating personal equilibria. Although their model has only a trivial intersection (expected utility) with other reference-dependent models, it ha...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Contagion in Financial Networks

By Paul Glasserman and H. Peyton Young

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

The recent financial crisis has prompted much new research on the interconnectedness of the modern financial system and the extent to which it contributes to systemic fragility. Network connections diversify firms' risk exposures, but they also create cha...

The Econometrics of Matching Models

By Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanié

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Many questions in economics can be fruitfully analyzed in the framework of matching models. Until recently, empirical work has lagged far behind theory in this area. This review reports on recent developments that have considerably expanded the range of m...

State and Development: The Need for a Reappraisal of the Current Literature

By Pranab Bardhan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

This essay tries to bring out some of the complexities that are overlooked in the usual treatment of the state in the institutional economics literature and supplement the latter with a discussion of some alternative approaches to looking at the possible ...

Understanding African Poverty over the Longue Durée: A Review of Africa's Development in Historical Perspective

By Margaret McMillan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

The sixteen essays edited and synthesized by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson contribute significantly to our understanding of the following questions: (1) When did Africa become poor? (2) Why did Africa become poor...

Review of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism by Christine Desan

By William Roberds

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

In the eighteenth century, the Bank of England revolutionized money through its large-scale introduction of circulating banknotes. The consequences of this revolution are felt even today. In Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism

Current Federal Reserve Policy under the Lens of Economic History: A Review Essay

By Stephen D. Williamson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

This review essay reviews the volume edited by Owen Humpage, Current Federal Reserve Policy under the Lens of Economic History: Essays to Commemorate the Federal Reserve System’s Centennial, and provides a broader perspective on central-banking i...

Review of Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences by Carles Boix

By Alberto Alesina

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences argues that geography, technology, and wars determined the formation of a ruling class, inequality, and institutional development, rather than the other way around. Institutio...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016