Journal of Political Economy

Mayshar et al. (2022) apply an instrumental variables identification strategy to data from nearly 1,000 societies included in the Ethnographic Atlas to claim that cultivation of cereals (appropriable by elites), rather than increased land productivity following the adoption of agriculture, led to the development of the state. We show two things. (1) Evidence for the appropriability theory holds w…

We state a sufficient condition under which choice data alone suffices to identify consumer preferences when choices are not fully informed. Suppose that: (i) the data generating process is a search model in which the attribute hidden to consumers is observed by the econometrician; (ii) if a consumer searches good j, she also searches goods which are better than j in terms of the non-hidden compo…

Pay-as-bid (or discriminatory or multiple-price) auctions are used to sell homogenous goods such as treasury securities and commodities.We prove the uniqueness of their pure-strategy Bayesian Nash equilibrium and establish a tractable representation of equilibrium bids for symmetrically-informed bidders.Analyzing design, we show that supply transparency and full disclosure are revenue-maximizing …

We present a dynamic quantitative trade and migration model that incorporates downward nominal wage rigidities and show how this framework can generate changes in unemployment and labor participation that match those uncovered by the empirical literature studying the “China shock.” We find that the China shock leads to average welfare increases in most U.S. states, including many that experience …

We analyze how private decisions and optimal public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences, material incentives, and social norms. We show how honor and stigma interact with incentives and derive optimal taxation. We then analyze the expressive role of law as embodying society’s values and identify when it calls for a weakening or a strengthening of incentives. The law should be…