What Has Mattered to Economics Since 1970

By E. Han Kim, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Citations are one way that past research echoes through time. In this paper, we compile a list of articles published in major refereed economics journals in the last 35 years that have received more than 500 citations as of June 2006. We then use this lis...

The Japanese Saving Rate

By Kaiji Chen, Ayşe İmrohoroğlu, and Selahattin İmrohoroğlu

American Economic Review, December 2006

Despite much work, economists have not been able to quantitatively account for the differences in the Japanese and U.S. saving rates after World War II. In this paper, we show that the use of actual Japanese total factor productivity growth rates in a sta...

Competence Implies Credibility

By Giuseppe Moscarini

American Economic Review, March 2007

The (reputation for) competence of a central bank at doing its job makes monetary policy under discretion credible and transparent. Based on its reading of the state of the economy, the central bank announces its policy intentions to the public in a ch...

Credible Commitment to Optimal Escape from a Liquidity Trap: The Role of the Balance Sheet of an Independent Central Bank

By Olivier Jeanne and Lars E. O. Svensson

American Economic Review, March 2007

Central banks target CPI inflation; independent central banks are concerned about their balance sheet and the level of their capital. The first fact makes it difficult for a central bank to implement the optimal escape from a liquidity trap, because it un...

Does Aid Affect Governance?

By Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Great Financial Crisis of 1914: What Can We Learn from Aldrich–Vreeland Emergency Currency?

By William L. Silber

American Economic Review, May 2007

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Timing of Monetary Policy Shocks

By Giovanni Olivei and Silvana Tenreyro

American Economic Review, June 2007

A vast empirical literature has documented delayed and persistent effects of monetary policy shocks on output. We show that this finding results from the aggregation of output impulse responses that differ sharply depending on the timing of the shock. ...

The Evolution of Central Bank Governance around the World

[Symposium: Monetary Policy]

By Christopher Crowe and Ellen E. Meade

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

The past two decades have seen enormous changes in central banks and their practices. In some countries, older institutions have been fundamentally restructured. In other, such as the countries of the former Soviet Union, entirely new central banks have b...

Automobiles on Steroids: Product Attribute Trade-Offs and Technological Progress in the Automobile Sector

By Christopher R. Knittel

American Economic Review, December 2011

This paper estimates the technological progress that has occurred since 1980 in the automobile industry and the trade-offs faced when choosing between fuel economy, weight, and engine power characteristics. The results suggest that if weight, horsepower, ...

The Cross-Section of Foreign Currency Risk Premia and Consumption Growth Risk: Reply

By Hanno Lustig and Adrien Verdelhan

American Economic Review, December 2011

The consumption growth beta of an investment strategy that goes long in high interest rate currencies and short in low interest rate currencies is large and significant. Consumption risk price differs significantly from zero, even after accounting for the...

Contraction and Expansion: The Divergence of Private Sector and Public Sector Unionism in the United States

[Symposium: Explaining Savings]

By Richard B. Freeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

The institutional structure of the American labor market changed remarkably from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1980s. What explains the decline in union representation of private wage and salary workers? Why have unions expanded in the public sector while co...

Puzzles: On the Economics of Crime and Confiscation

By Ted Bergstrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The puzzles in this column focus on the issues of crime and confiscation. Answers to all three puzzles can be found at the end of the column.

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

Did the Tax Reform Act of 1986 Simplify Tax Matters?

[Symposium: Tax Reform Act of 1986]

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

This paper attempts to assess whether the Tax Reform Act of 1986 simplified tax matters significantly, or at all. I conclude that, despite a few scattered signs that tax-related financial planning has declined, the compliance cost of the income tax system...

Symposium on Economists as Policy Advocates

[Symposium: Economists as Policy Advocates]

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Maturity, Indebtedness, and Default Risk

By Satyajit Chatterjee and Burcu Eyigungor

American Economic Review, October 2012

We advance quantitative-theoretic models of sovereign debt by proving the existence of a downward sloping equilibrium price function for long-term debt and implementing a novel method to accurately compute it. We show that incorporating long-term debt al...

Credit Market Consequences of Improved Personal Identification: Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi

By Xavier Giné, Jessica Goldberg, and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, October 2012

We implemented a randomized field experiment in Malawi examining borrower responses to being fingerprinted when applying for loans. This intervention improved the lender's ability to implement dynamic repayment incentives, allowing it to withhold future l...

Taxes and Time Use: Fiscal Policy in a Household Production Model

By Kelly S. Ragan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Time use data on work and leisure is presented for a broad group of OECD countries. The home production model explicitly accounts for taxes and public expenditures on day care and elder care, substitutes for work households perform at home. Taxes are im...

Decentralized Deterrence, with an Application to Labor Tax Auditing

By Edoardo Di Porto, Nicola Persico, and Nicolas Sahuguet

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

This paper studies a new strategic auditing game in which atomistic auditors maximize the success rate of audits, and provides a method to calibrate its parameters based on audit data. Calibrating the model to Italian auditing data, we provide an estim...