Abstract: What makes international threats credible? Recent theories point to domestic audience costs: the domestic price a leader would pay for making foreign threats and then backing down. This article provides the first direct evidence of audience costs. The analysis, based on experiments embedded in public opinion surveys, shows that audience costs exist across a wide range of conditions and increase with the level of escalation. The costs are evident throughout the population, and especially among politically active citizens who have the greatest potential to shape government policy. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that audience costs arise because citizens care about the international reputation of the country or leader. These findings help identify how, and under what conditions, domestic audiences make commitments credible. At the same time, they demonstrate the promise of using experiments to answer previously intractable questions in the field of international relations.

Victor Lesser (University of Massachussets, USA)

comments. A special thanks to Sanjay Jain, with whom I am collaborating on related theoretical

effects of competition and equal treatment laws

Although committees constitute one of the most significant and well-researched forms of internal legislative organizations, the nature and causes of variations in committee structures among different legislatures has received little consideration. We suggest that strong committees emerge as a structural solution to the needs of each party in a coalition government to keep tabs on each other. This proposition is tested against alternative American and comparative explanations of internal legislative design using new data on committee structures from 31 national assemblies. The evidence receives supplemental support from a case study tracing the reorganization and strengthening of committees in the Oireachtas (Irish parliament) following Ireland’s shift from single party to coalition government.

and digitizing data records. J-PAL Latin America and in particular Elizabeth Coble provided excellent field assistance. We thank Ivan Silva of DEMRE for help locating and accessing data records. We thank the excellent leadership and staff at the Chilean Ministry of Education for their invaluable

The last decade has seen a burst of micro price studies. Many studies analyze data underlying national CPIs and PPIs. Others focus on more granular sub-national grocery store data. We review these studies with an eye toward the role of price setting in business cycles. We summarize with ten stylized facts: Prices change at least once a year, with temporary price discounts and product turnover often playing an important role. After excluding many short-lived prices, prices change closer to once a year. The frequency of price changes differs widely across goods, however, with more cyclical goods exhibiting greater price flexibility. The timing of price changes is little synchronized across sellers. The hazard (and size) of price changes does not increase with the age of the price. The cross-sectional distribution of price changes is thick-tailed, but contains many small price changes too. Finally, strong linkages exist between price changes and wage changes.

Although there is intense debate about the effect of increased expenditure on education in developed countries, there is widespread consensus that provision of textbooks can substantially increase test scores in developing countries. This paper evaluates a program through which a Dutch non-profit organization provided textbooks to 25 rural Kenyan primary schools that were chosen randomly from a group of 100 candidate schools. After one school year, average test scores did not differ substantially between program and comparison schools. However, for those students in the top quintile of the distribution of initial academic achievement, the program raised test scores by at least 0.2 standard deviations.

participants in the annual meeting of the American Education Finance Association for their helpful comments and suggestions. Blame for all remaining errors lies with us. IRP publications (discussion papers, special reports, and the newsletter Focus) are now available electronically. The IRP Web Site can be accessed at the following address:

their invaluable assistance with the planning and