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Secrets of the Academy: The Drivers of University Endowment Success

By Josh Lerner, Antoinette Schoar, and Jialan Wang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

University endowments have received much attention recently for their superior investment returns compared with other institutional investors. This study documents trends in college and university endowment returns and investments in the United States bet...

Information and Prices with Capacity Constraints

By Benjamin Lester

òòò½Íø Review, June 2011

In the theoretical literature on consumer search, one conclusion is nearly universal: as buyers become better able to observe and compare prices ex ante, sellers will set lower prices in equilibrium. In this paper, I examine a standard consumer search mod...

Pathways to Adjustment: The Case of Information Technology Workers

By John Bound, Breno Braga, Joseph M. Golden, and Sarah Turner

òòò½Íø Review, May 2013

One long-standing hypothesis about science and engineering labor markets is that the supply of highly skilled workers is likely to be inelastic in the short run. We consider the market for computer scientists and electrical engineers (IT workers) and the ...

Corrigendum: Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

By Jose Apesteguia and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta

òòò½Íø Review, June 2011

Robustly Optimal Monetary Policy with Near-Rational Expectations

By Michael Woodford

òòò½Íø Review, March 2010

The paper considers optimal monetary stabilization policy in a forward-looking model, when the central bank recognizes that private sector expectations need not be precisely model-consistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possib...

What Has Economics to Say about Racial Discrimination?

[Symposium: Discrimination in Product, Credit and Labor Markets]

By Kenneth J. Arrow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

Racial discrimination pervades every aspect of a society in which it is found. It is found above all in attitudes of both races, but also in social relations, in intermarriage, in residential location, and, frequently, in legal barriers. It is also found...

Input Constraints and the Efficiency of Entry: Lessons from Cardiac Surgery

By David M. Cutler, Robert S. Huckman, and Jonathan T. Kolstad

òòò½Íø Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

Prior studies suggest that with elastically supplied inputs free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of...

Fiscal Policy in a Financial Crisis: Standard Policy versus Bank Rescue Measures

By Robert Kollmann, Werner Roeger, and Jan in't Veld

òòò½Íø Review, May 2012

A key dimension of fiscal policy during the financial crisis was massive government support for the banking system. The macroeconomic effects of that support have, so far, received little attention in the literature. This paper fills this gap, using a qua...

Tournaments and Office Politics: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment

By Jeffrey Carpenter, Peter Hans Matthews, and John Schirm

òòò½Íø Review, March 2010

Tournaments can elicit more effort but sabotage may attenuate the effect of competition. Because it is hard to separate effort and ability, the evidence on tournaments is thin. There is even less evidence on sabotage because these acts often consist of su...

Inflation Persistence, the NAIRU, and the Great Recession

By Mark W. Watson

òòò½Íø Review, May 2014

The rate of inflation fell far less over the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985 despite similar large increases in the unemployment rate. This paper asks why. Possible explanations include a change in the persistence of inflation, changes in NA...

Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

By Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan

òòò½Íø Review, September 2004

We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are randomly assigned African-American- or White-sounding names. White names receive 50 percent more...

On the Performance of the U.S. Transportation System: Caution Ahead

By Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Transportation is a vital sector of the U.S. economy based on consumers', firms', and government's enormous expenditures in money and time and on its effect on virtually all other sectors in the economy. I assess the performance of the transportation sy...

Simple Market Equilibria with Rationally Inattentive Consumers

By Filip ²Ñ²¹³ÙÄ›Âá°ì²¹ and Alisdair McKay

òòò½Íø Review, May 2012

We study a market with rationally inattentive consumers who are unsure of the terms of the offers made by firms, but can acquire information about the terms at a cost. In a symmetric equilibrium, the price set by firms is continuously increasing in the c...

Distinguished Fellow: Mincering Labor Economics

By Sherwin Rosen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Jacob Mincer has helped set the research agenda and professional style in labor economics for over 30 years. His research helped uncover the empirical content of human capital theory, where he used those ideas to study the determinants of earnings and the...

Hazards of Expropriation: Tenure Insecurity and Investment in Rural China

By Hanan G. Jacoby, Guo Li, and Scott Rozelle

òòò½Íø Review, December 2002

We use household data from northeast China to examine the link between investment and land tenure insecurity induced by China's system of village-level land reallocation. We quantify expropriation risk using a hazard analysis of individual plot tenures an...

Call Market Experiments: Efficiency and Price Discovery through Multiple Calls and Emergent Newton Adjustments

By Charles R. Plott and Kirill Pogorelskiy

òòò½Íø Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

We study multiple-unit, laboratory experimental call markets in which orders are cleared by a single price at a scheduled "call." The markets are independent trading "days" with two calls each day preceded by a continuous and public order flow. Markets ap...

Liberalization, Moral Hazard in Banking, and Prudential Regulation: Are Capital Requirements Enough?

By Thomas F. Hellmann, Kevin C. Murdock, and Joseph E. Stiglitz

òòò½Íø Review, March 2000

In a dynamic model of moral hazard, competition can undermine prudent bank behavior. While capital-requirement regulation can induce prudent behavior, the policy yields Pareto-inefficient outcomes. Capital requirements reduce gambling incentives by puttin...

The Masking of the Decline in Manufacturing Employment by the Housing Bubble

By Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

The employment-to-population ratio among prime-aged adults aged 25–54 has fallen substantially since 2000. The explanations proposed for the decline in the employment-to-population ratio have been of two broad types. One set of explanations emphasizes c...

Rational Inattention to News: The Perils of Forward Guidance

By Gaetano Gaballo

òòò½Íø Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2016

This paper studies the social value of information about the future. In a stylized OLG model, agents need to forecast the future price level, they observe the current price and perceive with idiosyncratic noise the expectation announced by a more informed...

The Division of Spoils: Rent-Sharing and Discrimination in a Regulated Industry

By Sandra E. Black and Philip E. Strahan

òòò½Íø Review, September 2001

Until the middle of the 1970s, regulations constrained banks' ability to enter new markets. Over the subsequent 25 years, states gradually lifted these restrictions. This paper tests whether rents fostered by regulation were shared with labor, and whether...