Bid Takers or Market Makers? The Effect of Auctioneers on Auction Outcome

By Nicola Lacetera, Bradley J. Larsen, Devin G. Pope, and Justin R. Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

Auction design has been studied extensively; however, within a given design, does the process of how an auction is conducted matter as well? We address this question by looking for heterogeneity in the performance of auctioneers in English auctions. We an...

Exchange Efficiency with Weak Ownership Rights

By Oren Bar-Gill and Nicola Persico

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

We show that efficient exchange obtains independently of the degree to which a legal system protects the rights of owners. We study a number of different legal rules, including property rules (strong protection), liability rules (any party can take the ow...

The Dynamic Free Rider Problem: A Laboratory Study

By Marco Battaglini, Salvatore Nunnari, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

We report the results of an experiment that investigates free riding in the accumulation of durable public goods. We consider economies with reversibility, where contributions can be positive or negative; and economies with irreversibility, where contribu...

Achieving Efficiency in Dynamic Contribution Games

By Jakša Cvitanić and George Georgiadis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

We analyze a game in which a group of agents exerts costly effort over time to make progress on a project. The project is completed once the cumulative effort reaches a prespecified threshold, at which point it generates a lump-sum payoff. We characterize...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, November 2016

Dynamic Procurement under Uncertainty: Optimal Design and Implications for Incomplete Contracts

By Malin Arve and David Martimort

American Economic Review, November 2016

We characterize the optimal dynamic contract for a long-term basic service when an uncertain add-on is required later on. Introducing firm risk aversion has two impacts. Profits for the basic service can be backloaded to induce cheaper information revelat...

Intertemporal Price Discrimination: Dynamic Arrivals and Changing Values

By Daniel F. Garrett

American Economic Review, November 2016

We study the profit-maximizing price path of a monopolist selling a durable good to buyers who arrive over time and whose values for the good evolve stochastically. The setting is completely stationary with an infinite horizon. Contrary to the case with c...

Does Welfare Inhibit Success? The Long-Term Effects of Removing Low-Income Youth from the Disability Rolls

By Manasi Deshpande

American Economic Review, November 2016

I estimate the effects of removing low-income youth with disabilities from Supplemental Security Income (SSI) on their earnings and income in adulthood. Using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews, I fin...

Taxing Top CEO Incomes

By Laurence Ales and Christopher Sleet

American Economic Review, November 2016

We use a firm-CEO assignment framework to model the market for CEO effective labor. In the model's equilibrium, more talented CEOs match with and supply more effort to larger firms. Taxation of CEO incomes affects the equilibrium pricing of CEO effective ...

Leverage and Beliefs: Personal Experience and Risk-Taking in Margin Lending

By Peter Koudijs and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review, November 2016

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndic...

Trade and the Global Recession

By Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, Brent Neiman, and John Romalis

American Economic Review, November 2016

We develop a dynamic multicountry general equilibrium model to investigate forces acting on the global economy during the Great Recession and ensuing recovery. Our multisector framework accounts completely for countries' trade, investment, production, and...

Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France

By Luis Garicano, Claire Lelarge, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, November 2016

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms...

Medicaid Insurance in Old Age

By Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, and John Bailey Jones

American Economic Review, November 2016

The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses. We estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime Medicaid transfers and Medicaid val...

Free to Choose? Reform, Choice, and Consideration Sets in the English National Health Service

By Martin Gaynor, Carol Propper, and Stephan Seiler

American Economic Review, November 2016

Choice in public services is controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the effect of removing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model that explicitly captures the removal of the choice constraint...

The Berlin Stock Exchange in Imperial Germany: A Market for New Technology?

By Sibylle Lehmann-Hasemeyer and Jochen Streb

American Economic Review, November 2016

Analyzing 474 cases of firms going public in the German capital between 1892 and 1913, we show that innovative firms could rely on the Berlin stock market as a source of financing. Our data also reveal that initial public offerings (IPO) of innovative fir...

Endogenous Entry to Security-Bid Auctions

By Takeharu Sogo, Dan Bernhardt, and Tingjun Liu

American Economic Review, November 2016

We endogenize entry to a security-bid auction, where participation is costly and bidders must decide given their private valuations whether to participate. We first consider any minimum reserve security-bid of a fixed expected value that weakly exceeds th...

Persuading Voters

By Ricardo Alonso and Odilon Câmara

American Economic Review, November 2016

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters' choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician's optimal experiment. With a nonunanimous voting rule, she exp...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Giovanni Peri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Immigration has been a steady force acting on population and employment within countries throughout human history. Focusing on the last four decades, we show that the mix of immigrants to rich countries has been, overall, rather balanced between college a...

The Impact of Immigration: Why Do Studies Reach Such Different Results?

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Christian Dustmann, Uta Schönberg, and Jan Stuhler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

We classify the empirical literature on the wage impact of immigration into three groups, where studies in the first two groups estimate different relative effects, and studies in the third group estimate the total effect of immigration on wages. We inter...