Katharine Coman's “Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation,” published in March 1911 in the first issue of the American Economic Review, addressed issues of water supply, rights, and organization. These same issues have relevance today, in the face of growing concern about the availability of fresh water worldwide. The central point of this article is that appropriative water rights and irrigation districts that emerged in the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to aridity to facilitate agricultural water delivery, use, and trade raise the transaction costs today of water markets. These markets are vital for smooth reallocation of water to higher-valued uses elsewhere in the economy and for flexible response to greater hydrological uncertainty. This institutional path dependence illustrates how past arrangements to meet conditions of the time constrain contemporary economic opportunities. They cannot be easily significantly modified or replaced ex post.

The current members of the Committee on Economic Statistics are Matthew Shapiro, University of Michigan (Chair); Mark Bils, University of Rochester; Dennis Fixler, Bureau of Economic Analysis; Barbara Fraumeni, University of Southern Maine; David Johnson, Census Bureau; Randall Kroszner, University of Chicago; Jonathan Parker, Northwestern University; Charles Schultze, Brookings Institution; and Jack Triplett. In January 2007, the Executive Committee voted to give the Committee standing authority to organize three sessions each year for inclusion on the program of the Association’s annual meeting. At its April 2008 meeting, the Executive Committee voted to allow the Committee to designate one session each year for publication in the annual Papers and Proceedings volume. For the January 2011 meeting, the Committee circulated a call for papers related to the statistical issues arising from the financial crisis and potential changes in financial regulations, markets, and institutions in addition to any topics related to economic statistics. The following three sessions are included in the program of the January 2010 meeting: “Frontiers of Productivity and Output Measurement,” “New Approaches to Measuring Household-Level Finances,” and “Measuring Financial Capacity and Risk: Lessons from the Financial Crisis.” Details of the sessions are given in the Table. The Committee has also undertaken the task of commissioning reviews of needs for data in particular subject matter areas. A group cochaired by Robert Feenstra and Robert Lipsey completed a report on data needs for research on international trade. It was discussed at this year’s National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute meetings. It is scheduled for discussion at a meeting of the Federal Economic American Economic Association Committee on Statistics (AEAStat)

A striking fact about pricing is the prevalence of “sales”: large temporary price cuts followed by prices returning to exactly their former levels. This paper builds a macroeconomic model with a rationale for sales based on firms facing customers with different price sensitivities. Even if firms can adjust sales without cost, monetary policy has large real effects owing to sales being strategic substitutes: a firm's incentive to have a sale is decreasing in the number of other firms having sales. Thus the flexibility seen in individual prices due to sales does not translate into flexibility of the aggregate price level.

The hedonic model, which has been used extensively in the Environmental, Urban, and Real Estate literatures, allows for the estimation of the implicit prices of housing and neighborhood attributes, as well as households' demand for these non-marketed amenities. A recognized drawback of the existing hedonic literature is that the models assume a myopic decision-maker. In this paper, we estimate a dynamic hedonic model and find that the average household is willing to pay $472 per year for a ten percent reduction in violent crime. In addition, we find that the traditional, myopic model suffers from a 21 percent negative bias.

Each year, more than 250 students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are shot. The authors of this paper worked with the leadership of CPS to build a predictive model of shootings that helped determine which students would be included in a highly targeted and resource intensive mentorship program. This paper describes our predictive model and offers a preliminary evaluation of the mentoring intervention performed by Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. (YAP). We find little evidence that the intervention reduces school misconducts or improves educational outcomes. The scale of intervention was too small to generate meaningful findings on shootings.

We use the draft lottery to construct instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the impact of Vietnam-era military service on veterans' Social Security (SSA) earnings through 2007. We also use SSA data to construct IV estimates for employment (as measured by an indicator for positive earnings) and disability status (as measured by an indicator for social security disability program application). New findings for recent years show surprisingly rapid convergence in veteran and nonveteran earnings: by the early 1990s, there was no longer a substantial Vietnam-era conscription penalty. The IV estimates also show no effect on employment or disability rates.

Although backward induction is a cornerstone of game theory, most laboratory experiments have found that agents are not able to successfully backward induct. We analyze the play of world-class chess players in the centipede game, which is ill-suited for testing backward induction, and in pure backward induction games—Race to 100 games. We find that chess players almost never play the backward induction equilibrium in the centipede game, but many properly backward induct in the Race to 100 games. We find no systematic within-subject relationship between choices in the centipede game and performance in pure backward induction games.

We analyze the effect of search frictions in the market for commercial health insurance. Frictions increase insurance premiums (enough to transfer 13.2 percent of consumer surplus from fully insured employer groups to insurers—approximately $34.4 billion in 1997); and increase insurance turnover (by 64 percent for the average policy). This rent transfer harms consumers and—when combined with heightened turnover—reduces incentives to invest in future health. We also find that a publicly financed insurance option can improve the efficiency of private insurance markets by reducing search friction induced distortions in pricing and marketing efforts.

The distribution of city populations has attracted much attention, in part because it constrains models of local growth. However, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on “legal” rather than “economic” definitions for medium and small cities. To remedy this difficulty, we construct cities “from the bottom up” by clustering populated areas obtained from high-resolution data. We find that Zipf 's law for population holds for cities as small as 5,000 inhabitants in Great Britain and 12,000 inhabitants in the US. We also find a Zipf 's law for areas. JEL: R11, R12, R23

US health care expenditures reached $2.5 trillion in 2009, representing 17.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and $8,086 per person (US Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2011). Since health care represents a large and growing share of the economy, and factors such as population aging imply that chronic disease treatment will continue to expand as a share of health expenditures, developing methods for assessing the value of quality improvement for chronic disease spending is of increasing importance for accurately measuring real economic activity. This paper develops a method for assessing the value of quality changes associated with health care for patients living with one important chronic disease, diabetes mellitus, using 11 years of detailed data on spending and quality of care for over 800 patients. We first provide an overview of measurement issues for health care quality, and then present our data, methods, results, and a brief discussion.