Diverging Opinions

By James Andreoni and Tymofiy Mylovanov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2012

People often see the same evidence but draw opposite conclusions, becoming polarized over time. More surprisingly, disagreements persist even when they are commonly known. We derive a model and present an experiment showing that opinions can diverge when ...

Policy Watch: Infrastructure Investment and Economic Growth

By Alicia H. Munnell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1992

In the late 1980s, David Aschauer (1989) triggered a long overdue dialogue among economists and political leaders when he published a study arguing that much of the decline in U.S. productivity that occurred in the 1970s was precipitated by declining rate...

Does the "New Economy" Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?

[Symposium: Computers and Productivity]

By Robert J. Gordon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

During the four years 1995-99 U.S. productivity growth experienced a strong revival and achieved growth rates exceeding that of the "golden age" of 1913-72. Accordingly many observers have declared the "New Economy" to be an Industrial Revolution even mor...

Parental Education and Offspring Outcomes: Evidence from the Swedish Compulsory School Reform

By Petter Lundborg, Anton Nilsson, and Dan-Olof Rooth

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

We use the Swedish compulsory school reform to estimate the causal effect of parental education on sons' outcomes. To this end, we use data from the Swedish military enlistment register on the entire population of males and consider outcomes, such as c...

The Cross Section of Foreign Currency Risk Premia and Consumption Growth Risk

By Hanno Lustig and Adrien Verdelhan

American Economic Review, March 2007

Aggregate consumption growth risk explains why low interest rate currencies do not appreciate as much as the interest rate differential and why high interest rate currencies do not depreciate as much as the interest rate differential. Domestic investor...

Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo

By Robert Dorfman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

This article will describe the enduring relationship between Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo initiated by a letter Malthus sent to Ricardo in June 1811. It was, very likely, the most remarkable and most fruitful collaboration in the history of economics....

Research on the Economics Profession

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

In this article, I survey some recent contributions to research on the profession, both to bring nonspecialists up to date on what is being done and to inform specialists of other researchers who are doing similar work. The economics profession is interes...

Collateral Damage: Effects of the Japanese Bank Crisis on Real Activity in the United States

By Joe Peek and Eric S. Rosengren

American Economic Review, March 2000

The Japanese banking crisis provides a natural experiment to test whether a loan supply shock can affect real economic activity. Because the shock was external to U.S. credit markets, yet connected through the Japanese bank penetration of U.S. markets, th...

Optimal Taxation and Optimal Tax Systems

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

In its current state, optimal tax theory is incomplete as a guide to action for critical issues in tax policy. It is incomplete because it has not yet come to terms with taxation as a system of coercively collecting revenues from individuals who will tend...

The Private and Public Economics of Renewable Electricity Generation

[Symposium: Energy Challenges]

By Severin Borenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Generating electricity from renewable sources is more expensive than conventional approaches but reduces pollution externalities. Analyzing the tradeoff is much more challenging than often presumed because the value of electricity is extremely dependent ...

Uneven Growth: A Framework for Research in Development Economics

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Debraj Ray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

The textbook paradigm of economywide development rests on the premise of "balanced growth": that is, on the presumption that all sectors will grow in unison over time as a country gets richer. Of course, we would all agree that balanced growth is an abstr...

Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor

By Eric V. Edmonds and Norbert Schady

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

Poor women with children in Ecuador were selected at random for a cash transfer that is less than 20 percent of median child labor earnings. Poor families with children in school at the time of the award use the transfer to postpone the child's entry into...

Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Edward E. Leamer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

My first reaction to "The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics," authored by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, was: Wow! This paper makes a stunningly good case for relying on purposefully randomized or accidentally randomized expe...

Liquidity Constraints and Imperfect Information in Subprime Lending

By William Adams, Liran Einav, and Jonathan Levin

American Economic Review, March 2009

We present new evidence on consumer liquidity constraints and the credit market conditions that might give rise to them. We analyze unique data from a large auto sales company serving the subprime market. Short-term liquidity appears to be a key driver...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2017

Includes "Glenn C. Loury: Distinguished Fellow"

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2016

Reducing Petroleum Consumption from Transportation

[Symposium: Energy Challenges]

By Christopher R. Knittel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

The United States consumes more petroleum-based liquid fuel per capita than any other OECD high-income country—30 percent more than the second-highest country (Canada) and 40 percent more than the third-highest (Luxembourg). The transportation secto...

The End of Cheap Chinese Labor

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Hongbin Li, Lei Li, Binzhen Wu, and Yanyan Xiong

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

In recent decades, cheap labor has played a central role in the Chinese model, which has relied on expanded participation in world trade as a main driver of growth. At the beginning of China's economic reforms in 1978, the annual wage of a Chinese urban ...

Urban-Biased Policies and Rising Income Inequality in China

By Dennis Tao Yang

American Economic Review, May 1999