Knowledge that Transforms

Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We propose a new calibration strategy of the standard model that uses data on the cost of vacancy creation and cyclicality of wages to identify the two key parameters –- the value of nonmarket activity and the bargaining weights. Our calibration implies that the model is consistent with the data.

We test whether good economic conditions and expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get reelected in a large panel of democracies. We find no evidence that deficits help reelection in any group of countries independent of income level, level of democracy, or government or electoral system. In developed countries and old democracies, deficits in election years or over the term of office reduce reelection probabilities. Higher growth rates over the term raise reelection probabilities only in developing countries and new democracies. Low inflation is rewarded by voters only in developed countries. These effects are both statistically significant and quite substantial quantitatively.

We study first- and second-price auctions with resale in a model with independent private values. With asymmetric bidders, the resulting inefficiencies create a motive for post-auction trade which, in our model, takes place via monopoly pricing—the winner makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the loser. We show (a) a first-price auction with resale has a unique monotonic equilibrium; and (b) with resale, the expected revenue from a first-price auction exceeds that from a second-price auction. The inclusion of resale possibilities thus permits a general revenue ranking of the two auctions that is not available when these are excluded.

The Administrative Foundations of Self-Enforcing Constitutions by Yadira Gonzalez de Lara, Avner Greif and Saumitra Jha. Published in volume 98, issue 2, pages 105-09 of American Economic Review, May 2008

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This paper differentiates itself from previous work by taking a direct approach, made possible by unique longitudinal data from the Berea Panel Study. The results from our study of Berea College students suggest that, while credit constraints likely play an important role in the drop-out decisions of some students, the large majority of attrition of students from low-income families should be primarily attributed to reasons other than credit constraints.

Using panel data for a large set of high-income, emerging market, developing, and transition countries, we find robust evidence that the large output loss from financial crises and some types of political crises is highly persistent. The results on financial crises are also highly robust to the assumption on exogeneity. Moreover, we find strong evidence of growth over optimism before financial crises. We also find a distinction between the output impact of civil wars versus other crises, in that there is a partial output rebound for civil wars but no significant rebound for financial crises or the other political crises.

In this paper I review evidence on the long-run relation between height and economic development in Italy. I ask three questions: What are the long-run trends of mean height and real incomes in Italy? What do we know about height dispersion? What other aspects of the distribution of height changed with economic development?

Assessment Practices and Trends in Undergraduate Economics Courses by Georg Schaur, Michael Watts and William E. Becker. Published in volume 98, issue 2, pages 552-56 of American Economic Review, May 2008

Most economists and neuroeconomists believe that individuals make choices first by assigning values to objects and then by selecting the option with the highest value, perhaps with some noise (Rangel, Colin Camerer, and Read Montague 2007). This raises a question with important implications for economics: How does the brain compute the values that guide decisions (henceforth called decision values) and what are the properties of those processes? Important and more concrete examples of these questions include the following: Does the brain always assign values to objects that are commensurate with the benefits that they generate, or does it make mistakes sometimes? Does the amount of time spent computing the value matter? Are there incidental variables, such as the way an object is displayed at the time of sale, that affect the value that is assigned to it? The properties of the brain’s value computation processes should be of interest to economists since those properties determine the extent to which individuals are able to make quality choices. In addition, the properties of these processes could have important implications for the behavioral and welfare effects of practices such as in-store marketing. In this paper we explore these questions theoretically and experimentally. We propose a simple model of how computation time and experience can affect the value that is assigned to items. The model makes several stark predictions that we test using behavioral experiments.

The onset of Medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the U.S. population. These changes lead to increases in the use of medical services, with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by type of service. While routine doctor visits increase more for groups that previously lacked insurance, hospital admissions for relatively expensive procedures like bypass surgery and joint replacement increase more for previously insured groups that are more likely to have supplementary coverage after 65, reflecting the relative generosity of their combined insurance package under Medicare.