AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 1, January 2001
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Buyers who use an Internet referral service save about 2 percent on their average new car purchase.
Though Internet shopping has been extolled for its convenience and its ability to deliver vast quantities of information to shoppers, the ongoing debate over how clicks will affect bricks in traditional retail channels has remained a largely speculative one. In Internet Car Retailing (NBER Working Paper No. 7961), Fiona Scott Morton, Florian Zettlemeyer, and Jorge...
Article
Collars could be used to completely eliminate the risk of future annuities falling below the Social Security benchmark level. Or, they could allow individuals to decide the level of risk they are prepared to accept in return for the possibility of higher retirement annuities.
Private financial markets could provide a minimum guarantee for Personal Retirement Account (PRA) annuities as part of an investment-based reform of Social Security. Under such a system, the "...
Article
School choice would ... raise the demand for teachers with select skills: teachers with a high caliber college education, with better math and science skills, with a high degree of independence, and those who put forth extra effort.
School choice takes many forms, including charter schools, vouchers, tax credits for private school tuition, and inter-district choice. Historically, teachers' organizations such as the National Education Association and the American...
Article
The authors find that during crises, emerging market funds engage in 'momentum trading,' selling stocks that recently declined and buying recent winners.
Like epidemics, financial crises tend to spread. Witness the 1997 Asian crisis, which quickly engulfed South Africa, Eastern Europe, and even Brazil. Many economists have argued that financial institutions sometimes panic, disregarding fundamentals, and thus spreading a crisis even to countries with strong...