Good-bye Lenin (or Not?): The Effect of Communism on People's Preferences

By Alberto Alesina and Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln

American Economic Review, September 2007

Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosity of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. This paper tests whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences. We exploit the experiment of Ger...

Behavioral and Experimental Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis: A Complex Systems Approach

By Cars Hommes

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This survey discusses behavioral and experimental macroeconomics, emphasizing a complex systems perspective. The economy consists of boundedly rational heterogeneous agents who do not fully understand their complex environment and use simple decision he...

Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Times: Europe and Beyond

By Guido Alfani

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Recent literature has reconstructed estimates of wealth and income inequality for a range of preindustrial, mostly European, societies covering medieval and early modern times, occasionally reaching back to antiquity and even prehistory. These estimates...

Capital Controls: Theory and Evidence

By Bilge Erten, Anton Korinek, and José Antonio Ocampo

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This paper synthesizes recent advances in the theoretical and empirical literature on capital controls. We start by observing that international capital flows have both benefits and costs, but some of these are not internalized by individual actors and ...

Directed Search and Competitive Search Equilibrium: A Guided Tour

By Randall Wright, Philipp Kircher, Benoît Julien, and Veronica Guerrieri

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This essay surveys the literature on directed search and competitive search equilibrium, covering theory and a variety of applications. These models share features with traditional search theory, but also differ in important ways. They share features with...

Planning on the Potomac: A Review Essay on Jason E. Taylor's Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act

By Joshua K. Hausman

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Taylor (2019) details heterogeneity in the effects of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) across industries and across time. Through first the President's Reemployment Act (PRA) and then industry-specific "codes of fair competition," the NIRA rais...

Back to the Good—or Were They the Bad—Old Days of Antitrust? A Review Essay of Jonathan B. Baker's The Antitrust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy

By Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This essay reviews Jonathan Baker's important book, The Antitrust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy, to frame the debate over appropriate antitrust policy and enforcement. Baker argues that competition is inadequate in many US markets and...

Review of Russia's Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy by Anders Åslund

By Michael Alexeev

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Anders Åslund provides a comprehensive description of the main political and economic events of Vladimir Putin's 20 years at the helm of the country. In politics, Åslund shows how Putin skillfully maneuvered to destroy democracy in Russia. I argue that ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Prediction: The Long and the Short of It

By Antony Millner and Daniel Heyen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021

Commentators often lament forecasters' inability to provide precise predictions of the long-run behavior of complex economic and physical systems. Yet their concerns often conflate the presence of substantial long-run uncertainty with the need for long-ru...

Flexible decision-making and short-term forecasts

[Research Highlight]

March 04, 2021

How valuable are long-run predictions?

Estimating Frisch elasticity

[Page]

A temporary tax holiday in Switzerland offers insights into how workers adjust to income changes.

Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Ro'ee Levy

American Economic Review, March 2021

Does the consumption of ideologically congruent news on social media exacerbate polarization? I estimate the effects of social media news exposure by conducting a large field experiment randomly offering participants subscriptions to conservative or lib...

"Soft" Affirmative Action and Minority Recruitment

By Daniel Fershtman and Alessandro Pavan

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

We study search, evaluation, and selection of candidates of unknown quality for a position. We examine the effects of "soft" affirmative action policies increasing the relative percentage of minority candidates in the candidate pool. We show that, while m...

Bringing financial markets together

[Research Highlight]

March 03, 2021

Securities are typically traded separately from one another. Would it be better to combine those transactions?

Connecting Disconnected Financial Markets?

By Milena Wittwer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021

In most financial markets, securities are traded in isolation. Such a disconnected market design can be inefficient if agents trade more than one security. I assess welfare effects of connecting markets by allowing orders for one security to depend on pri...

Spending now or saving for later

[Page]

How do lump-sum severance payments affect consumption for laid-off workers?