Stealth Consolidation: Evidence from an Amendment to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act

By Thomas G. Wollmann

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Prospective merger review is the most frequent application of antitrust law. It exempts transactions on the basis of size, though small deals can have large anticompetitive effects in segmented industries. I examine its impact on antitrust enforcement and...

The Culture of Overconfidence

By V. Bhaskar and Caroline Thomas

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Perceptions of overconfidence can exacerbate the tendency of reputationally concerned leaders to continue bad projects. Reputation concerns alone induce a bias toward inefficient continuation in a leader receiving information privately. When she is overco...

Labor Supply and the Value of Non-work Time: Experimental Estimates from the Field

By Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

We estimate the marginal value of non-work time (MVT) using a field experiment. We offered job applicants randomized wage-hour bundles. Choices over these bundles yield estimates of the MVT as a function of hours, tracing out a labor supply relationship. ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2019

Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics

By William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, June 2019

Can We Control Carbon Dioxide? (From 1975)

By William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, June 2019

A Macroeconomic Model of Price Swings in the Housing Market

By Carlos Garriga, Rodolfo Manuelli, and Adrian Peralta-Alva

American Economic Review, June 2019

This paper shows that a macro model with segmented financial markets can generate sizable movements in housing prices in response to changes in credit conditions. We establish theoretically that reductions in mortgage rates always have a positive effect o...

Tax Evasion and Inequality

By Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Review, June 2019

Drawing on a unique dataset of leaked customer lists from offshore financial institutions matched to administrative wealth records in Scandinavia, we show that offshore tax evasion is highly concentrated among the rich. The skewed distribution of offshore...

The Effect of House Prices on Household Borrowing: A New Approach

By James Cloyne, Kilian Huber, Ethan Ilzetzki, and Henrik Kleven

American Economic Review, June 2019

We investigate the effect of house prices on household borrowing using administrative mortgage data from the United Kingdom and a new empirical approach. The data contain household-level information on house prices and borrowing in a panel of homeowners, ...

Subsidies and Time Discounting in New Technology Adoption: Evidence from Solar Photovoltaic Systems

By Olivier De Groote and Frank Verboven

American Economic Review, June 2019

We study a generous program to promote the adoption of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems through subsidies on future electricity production, rather than through upfront investment subsidies. We develop a tractable dynamic model of new technology adoption, a...

Test Design and Minimum Standards

By Peter M. DeMarzo, Ilan Kremer, and Andrzej Skrzypacz

American Economic Review, June 2019

We analyze test design and certification standards when an uninformed seller has the option to generate and disclose costly information regarding asset quality. We characterize equilibria by a minimum principle: the test and disclosure policy are chosen t...

Does Incomplete Spanning in International Financial Markets Help to Explain Exchange Rates?

By Hanno Lustig and Adrien Verdelhan

American Economic Review, June 2019

We assume that domestic (foreign) agents, when investing abroad, can only trade in the foreign (domestic) risk-free rates. In a preference-free environment, we derive the exchange rate volatility and risk premia in any such incomplete spanning model, as w...

Tourism and Economic Development: Evidence from Mexico's Coastline

By Benjamin Faber and Cecile Gaubert

American Economic Review, June 2019

Tourism is a fast-growing services sector in developing countries. This paper combines a rich collection of Mexican microdata with a quantitative spatial equilibrium model and a new empirical strategy to study the long-term economic consequences of touris...

The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World?

By Yuyu Chen and David Y. Yang

American Economic Review, June 2019

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China to measure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored internet. We track subjects' media consumption, beliefs regarding the media, econom...

Monetary Policy and the Redistribution Channel

By Adrien Auclert

American Economic Review, June 2019

This paper evaluates the role of redistribution in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy to consumption. Three channels affect aggregate spending when winners and losers have different marginal propensities to consume: an earnings heterogeneity ch...

Report of Independent Auditor

American Economic Review, June 2019

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

Dynamic Mechanism Design: An Introduction

By Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Välimäki

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

We provide an introduction to the recent developments of dynamic mechanism design, with a primary focus on the quasilinear case. First, we describe socially optimal (or efficient) dynamic mechanisms. These mechanisms extend the well-known Vickrey–Clarkâ...

What We Have Learned about Terrorism since 9/11

By Khusrav Gaibulloev and Todd Sandler

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

This overview examines critically the post-9/11 empirical literature on terrorism. Major contributions by both economists and political scientists are included. We focus on five main themes: the changing nature of terrorism, the organization of terroris...

Price Theory

By E. Glen Weyl

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

I argue that there exists a coherent and relevant tradition in economic thought that I label "price theory." I define it as neoclassical microeconomic analysis that reduces rich and often incompletely specified models into "prices" (approximately) suffi...