AEAweb: JEP: Contents: Winter 2001

Journal of Economic Perspectives
Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 2001

Contents

Economics and Electronic Commerce
Severin Borenstein and Garth Saloner      3-12

The Implications of Electronic Commerce for Fiscal Policy (and Vice Versa)
Austan Goolsbee      13-24

Wiring the Labor Market
David H. Autor      25-40

The Internet and the Investor
Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean      41-54

Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce
David Lucking-Reiley and Daniel F. Spulber      55-68

The Emerging Landscape for Retail E-Commerce”
Yannis Bakos      69-80

A Symposium on the North American Economy
J. Bradford De Long      81-83

Life is not Easy: Mexico’s Quest for Stability and Growth
Nora Lustig      85-106

Canada: Life Beyond the Looking Glass
John F. Helliwell      107-124

The Impact of NAFTA on the United States
Mary E. Burfisher, Sherman Robinson and Karen Thierfelder      125-144

No History of Ideas, Please, We’re Economists
Mark Blaug      145-164

Insiders versus Outsiders
Assar Lindbeck and Dennis J. Snower      165-188

In Honor of Andrei Shleifer: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal
Olivier Blanchard     189-204

Policy Watch: Death Watch for the Estate Tax?
William G. Gale and Joel B. Slemrod      205-218

Anomalies: Risk Aversion
Matthew Rabin and Richard H. Thaler      219-232

Features:
Recommendations for Further Reading      233-240
Notes      241-245

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Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast. The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening? I discuss three labor market features that may be altered: how worker-firm matches are made; how labor services are delivered; and how local markets shape labor demand. Theory predicts these developments will produce social benefits. But the gains are unlikely to be uniform and realizing them will generate novel problems. One result may be the formation of new institutions to address issues accompanying these opportunities.

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Just as the industrial revolution mechanized the manufacturing functions of firms, the information revolution is automating their merchant functions. Four types of potential productivity gains are expected from business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce: cost efficiencies from automation of transactions, potential advantages of new market intermediaries, consolidation of demand and supply through organized exchanges, and changes in the extent of vertical integration of firms. The article examines the characteristics of B2B online intermediaries, including categories of goods traded, market mechanisms employed, and ownership arrangements, and considers the market structure of B2B e-commerce.

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Life is not Easy: Mexico’s Quest for Stability and Growth
Nora Lustig      

In the wake of the debt crisis in 1982, Mexico adopted far reaching reforms but growth and stability remained elusive for many years. At present, the reforms and NAFTA seem to be finally paying off: inflation for 2000 is close to 10 percent and output per capita grew at an average of 5.4 percent during the last five years. However, altogether output per capita was only 9 percent higher in 1999 than in 1980, a great disappointment for particularly the 20 million Mexicans that live on less than $2 a day.

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Canada's population, a tenth that of the United States, is perched close to the U.S. northern border, tightly but asymmetrically tied to U.S. information networks. However, trade, capital and population mobility remains an order of magnitude tighter among provinces than between provinces and states. This separating effect of the national border is not primarily due to barriers, but to networks of contacts, trust and institutions that make it efficient to concentrate economic activity within national borders. This separation combines with quite different histories to explain why Canadian economic, social, education and health care policies remain distinct from U.S. policies, often closer to those in Northern Europe.

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We describe the main economic arguments posed for and against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during the U.S. policy debate. To evaluate these arguments, we analyze recent trade data and survey post-NAFTA studies. We find that both the U.S. and Mexico benefit from NAFTA, with much larger relative benefits for Mexico. NAFTA also has had little effect on the U.S. labor market. These results confirm the consensus opinion of economists at the time of the debate. Finally, studies find that trade creation greatly exceeds trade diversion in the region under NAFTA, especially in intermediate goods.

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Economists ubiquitously employ a simple and elegant explanation for risk aversion: It derives from the concavity of the utility-of-wealth function within the expected-utility framework. We show that this explanation is not plausible in most applications, since anything more than economically negligible risk aversion over moderate stakes requires a utility-of-wealth function that is so concave that it predicts absurdly severe risk aversion over very large stakes. We present examples of how the expected-utility framework has misled economists, and why we believe a better explanation for risk aversion must incorporate loss aversion and mental accounting.

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Features (view in pdf format):
Recommendations for Further Reading (AEA members only)
Notes      

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