Producing Organ Donors

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By David H. Howard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Organ transplantation is one of the greatest technological achievements of modern medicine, but the ability of patients to benefit from transplantation is limited by shortages of transplantable organs. The median waiting time for patients placed on the ki...

Projection Bias in Catalog Orders

By Michael Conlin, Ted O'Donoghue, and Timothy J. Vogelsang

American Economic Review, September 2007

Evidence suggests that people understand qualitatively how tastes change over time, but underestimate the magnitudes. This evidence is limited, however, to laboratory evidence or surveys of reported happiness. We test for such projection bias in field ...

Exchange Asymmetries Incorrectly Interpreted as Evidence of Endowment Effect Theory and Prospect Theory?

By Charles R. Plott and Kathryn Zeiler

American Economic Review, September 2007

Systematic asymmetries in exchange behavior have been widely interpreted as support for "endowment effect theory," an application of prospect theory positing that loss aversion and utility function kinks set by entitlements explain observed asymmetries. W...

Life-Cycle Prices and Production

By Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst

American Economic Review, December 2007

We use scanner data and time diaries to document how households substitute time for money through shopping and home production. We document substantial heterogeneity in prices paid for identical goods for the same area and time, with older households s...

Traders' Expectations in Asset Markets: Experimental Evidence

By Ernan Haruvy, Yaron Lahav, and Charles N. Noussair

American Economic Review, December 2007

We elicit traders' predictions of future price trajectories in repeated experimental markets for a 15-period-lived asset. We find that individuals' beliefs about prices are adaptive, and primarily based on past trends in the current and previous markets...

What Do a Million Observations on Banks Say about the Transmission of Monetary Policy?

By Anil K. Kashyap and Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Review, June 2000

We study the monetary-transmission mechanism with a data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured U.S. commercial bank from 1976 to 1993. We find that the impact of monetary policy on lending is stronger for banks with less liquid balance...

The Nature of Credit Constraints and Human Capital

By Lance J. Lochner and Alexander Monge-Naranjo

American Economic Review, October 2011

We develop a human capital model with borrowing constraints explicitly derived from government student loan (GSL) programs and private lending under limited commitment. The model helps explain the persistent strong positive correlation between ability and...

Risk Matters: The Real Effects of Volatility Shocks

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Pablo Guerrón-Quintana, Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez, and Martin Uribe

American Economic Review, October 2011

We show how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have an important effect on variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours. We start by documenting the strong evidence of time-varyin...

International Liquidity in a Multipolar World

By Barry Eichengreen

American Economic Review, May 2012

Today's global monetary and financial system, to a remarkable extent, continues to rely on the U.S. dollar for international liquidity. This reflects the currency's historic role, the liquidity of American financial markets, and the absence of alternativ...

The Currency of Reciprocity: Gift Exchange in the Workplace

By Sebastian Kube, Michel André Maréchal, and Clemens Puppe

American Economic Review, June 2012

What determines reciprocity in employment relations? We conducted a controlled field experiment to measure the extent to which monetary and nonmonetary gifts affect workers' performance. We find that nonmonetary gifts have a much stronger impact than mon...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

Symposium on the State and Economic Development

[Symposium: The State and Economic Development]

By Pranab Bardhan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The role of the state in economic development is one of the oldest topics in economics, yet controversies rage with similar passion and camps are divided on lines today broadly similar to the early writings. Though the authors of the papers in this sympos...

The When, the How and the Why of Mathematical Expression in the History of Economic Analysis

By Philip Mirowski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

In writings about the history of the use of mathematical expression in economics, there seems to be a conviction that the movement towards its current flowering was cumulative, inevitable, and indeed, natural. While, such notions are widely held among pra...

Can Neoclassical Economics Underpin the Reform of Centrally Planned Economies?

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By Peter Murrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

This paper addresses whether neoclassical economics can provide the intellectual underpinning for a theory of reform. I examine whether the neoclassical model satisfies an essential condition to qualify for this role: does it give us a satisfactory explan...

Legality and Market Reform in Soviet-Type Economies

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By John M. Litwack

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

The classical Soviet-type system operates in the virtual absence of economic legality, which is a prerequisite to a successful transition to a market economy in the Soviet Union and the nations of Eastern Europe. In the absence of economic legality, the l...

Effects of Tax Reform on Labor Supply, Investment, and Saving

[Symposium: Tax Reform Act of 1986]

By Barry Bosworth and Gary Burtless

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

The U.S. tax system received two major overhauls during the 1980s: the tax cuts of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Supporters of both reforms argued that major changes in tax policy could boost saving, investment, labor supply, and entrepreneurship. ...

Corporate Tax Integration: A View from the Treasury Department

By R. Glenn Hubbard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

"Integration" of the corporate and individual income taxes refers to any plan in which corporate income is taxed only once, rather than taxed both when earned and when distributed to shareholders as dividends. A consensus is emerging from the ongoing stud...

The Salaries of Ph.D.'s in Academe and Elsewhere

By Albert Rees

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

It has long been known that Ph.D.'s working for academic institutions earn less than Ph.D.'s in the same disciplines working for other kinds of employers, especially government and industry. It has not been possible to tell, however, whether this differen...

The Case of the Missing Currency

By Case M. Sprenkle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

In late 1992, currency in the hands of the public was close to $300 billion, representing nearly 30 percent of M1. One would think that an economic variable of this magnitude would be well-analyzed and well-understood. Quite the contrary. The last serious...

Estimating the Deterrent Effect of Incarceration Using Sentencing Enhancements

By David S. Abrams

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

Increasing criminal sanctions may reduce crime through two primary mechanisms: deterrence and incapacitation. Disentangling their effects is crucial for optimal policy setting. I use sentence enhancements due to the introduction of state add-on gun laws...