Policy Watch: Child Support Policies

By Robert I. Lerman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

With more parents living apart, the societal problem of parents who fail to share with each other or with their children becomes more acute. Although governments have mainly relied on public transfers to address the resulting economic hardships among chil...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Correspondence

By Allan H. Meltzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Correspondence and response regarding: Socialist Economic Transformation

Physician Agency and Adoption of Generic Pharmaceuticals

By Toshiaki Iizuka

American Economic Review, October 2012

I examine physician agency in health care services in the context of the choice between brand-name and generic pharmaceuticals. I examine micro-panel data from Japan, where physicians can legally make profits by prescribing and dispensing drugs. The resul...

Married with Children: A Collective Labor Supply Model with Detailed Time Use and Intrahousehold Expenditure Information

By Laurens Cherchye, Bram De Rock, and Frederic Vermeulen

American Economic Review, December 2012

We propose a collective labor supply model with household production that generalizes a model of Blundell, Chiappori, and Meghir (2005). Adults' preferences depend not only on own leisure and individual private consumption of market goods. They also dep...

Entropy and the Value of Information for Investors

By Antonio Cabrales, Olivier Gossner, and Roberto Serrano

American Economic Review, February 2013

Consider an investor who fears ruin when facing investments that satisfy no-arbitrage. Before investing he can purchase information about the state of nature as an information structure. Given his prior, information structure α investment dominat...

Fairness and Redistribution: Comment

By Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra

American Economic Review, February 2013

We provide an example that shows that in the Alesina and Angeletos (2005) model one can obtain multiplicity even if luck plays no role in the economy. Thus, it is not critical that the noise to signal ratio be increasing in taxes, or that desired taxes ar...

Fairness and Redistribution: Reply

By Alberto Alesina, George-Marios Angeletos, and Guido Cozzi

American Economic Review, February 2013

This paper responds to the comment of Di Tella and Dubra (2013). We first clarify that the model of Alesina and Angeletos (2005) admits two distinct types of multiplicity: one that is at the core of their contribution, and a separate one that is at work i...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2013

The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets

By M. Keith Chen

American Economic Review, April 2013

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that the languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of la...

Merger Policy with Merger Choice

By Volker Nocke and Michael D. Whinston

American Economic Review, April 2013

We analyze the optimal policy of an antitrust authority towards horizontal mergers when merger proposals are endogenous and firms choose among alternative mergers. In our model, the optimal policy of an antitrust authority that seeks to maximize expected ...

Does Less Income Mean Less Representation?

By Eric Brunner, Stephen L. Ross, and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

We assemble a novel dataset of matched legislative and constituent votes and demonstrate that less income does not mean less representation. We show: (i) The opinions of high- and low-income voters are highly correlated; the legislator's vote often refle...

Extreme Wage Inequality: Pay at the Very Top

By Brian D. Bell and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, May 2013

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the United Kingdom. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade. Ne...

Income Inequality, Mobility, and Turnover at the Top in the US, 1987-2010

By Gerald Auten, Geoffrey Gee, and Nicholas Turner

American Economic Review, May 2013

While cross-sectional data show increasing income inequality in the United States, it is also important to examine how incomes change over time. Using income tax data, this paper provides new evidence on long-term and intergenerational mobility, and persi...

Deconstructing Income and Income Inequality Measures: A Crosswalk from Market Income to Comprehensive Income

By Philip Armour, Richard V. Burkhauser, and Jeff Larrimore

American Economic Review, May 2013

Recent research on levels and trends in the United States in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. We show the sensitivity of alternative income measures in capturing income trends using a unified data set. Focusing solely on ma...

Consumption and Income Inequality and the Great Recession

By Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine changes in consumption and income inequality between 2000 and 2011. During the most recent recession, unemployment rose and asset values declined sharply. We investigate how the recession affected inequality while addressing concerns about unde...

Measuring the Trends in Inequality of Individuals and Families: Income and Consumption

By Jonathan D. Fisher, David S. Johnson, and Timothy M. Smeeding

American Economic Review, May 2013

We present evidence on the level of and trend in inequality from 1985-2010 in the United States, using disposable income and consumption for a sample of individuals from the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey. Differing from the findings in other recent res...

The Geography of Trade and Technology Shocks in the United States

By David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the United States. Regional exposure to technological change, as measured by specialization in routine task-intensive production and clerical occupatio...

Achieving Escape Velocity: Neighborhood and School Interventions to Reduce Persistent Inequality

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools...

Beyond Work Ethic: Religion, Individual, and Political Preferences

By Christoph Basten and Frank Betz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experime...