American Economic Association Nashville, Tennessee 0022-0515 Journal of Economic Literature 38 4 December 2000 827874 Natural "Natural Experiments" in Economics Mark R.RosenzweigKenneth I.Wolpin The recent literature exploiting natural events as "natural experiment" instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent. The methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simple economic models are used to elucidate the implicit assumptions made by the authors and to demonstrate the sensitivity of the interpretations of the findings to the relaxation of some of these assumptions. http://www.aeaweb.org/journal/contents/December2000.html American Economic Association Nashville, Tennessee 0022-0515 Journal of Economic Literature 38 4 December 2000 875914 Renewable Natural Resource Management and Use without Markets Gardner M.Brown Natural resources, by their nature, are not readily bent to the status of private property. Efficient resource use is complicated by jurisdictional externalities, public goods, non-use values, and beneficiaries spatially separated from the location of resources. The task is made more challenging by ecological complexity that obscures cause (benefits) and effects (costs), and dramatic time lags between individual actions and subsequent social consequences that, together with substantial uncertainty, introduce the chance of irreversibilities. Resource economists have played a major role in the literature on externalities, the development of individual transferable quotas, non-market valuation techniques and common property management. http://www.aeaweb.org/journal/contents/December2000.html American Economic Association Nashville, Tennessee 0022-0515 Journal of Economic Literature 38 4 December 2000 915925 The "New Political Economy": Recent Books by Allen Drazen and by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini GillesSaint-Paul The last fifteen years have seen an explosion of contributions in the field of political economy. Two new books, Political Economy in Macroeconomics by Allan Drazen and Political Economy: Explaining Economic Policy by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, organize this literature and evaluate what has been learned. Drazen mostly focuses on applications for macroeconomic policy, while Persson and Tabellini focus on the various tools that can be used to analyze the political process, and the institutional details of decision-making. http://www.aeaweb.org/journal/contents/December2000.html American Economic Association Nashville, Tennessee 0022-0515 Journal of Economic Literature 38 4 December 2000 926935 A Review of O'Rourke and Williamson's Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy C. KnickHarley Much of the comparative economic history of the nineteenth century focuses on the spread of the Industrial Revolution from Britain. Incomes converged, in this view, as the transfer of superior technology raised incomes in the periphery. In Globalization and History, Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson challenge this technological approach, arguing that neoclassical effects of trade and factor supply changes provide more insight. Increased trade, stimulated by falling transportation costs, and factor movements caused prices of locally scarce factors to fall and promoted factor price convergence. http://www.aeaweb.org/journal/contents/December2000.html