The Mirrlees Review and the State of Public Economics

By Anthony B. Atkinson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

The Mirrlees Review of taxation in the United Kingdom is a landmark in the analysis of U.K. fiscal policy, and of wide interest to public finance economists around the world. This review concentrates on what we can learn from the Review about the current ...

The Mirrlees Review

By Martin Feldstein

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

The Mirrlees Review is an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the British tax system with detailed recommendations for reform. This review essay focuses on those issues that are also likely to be of interest to an American reader. The Review has the t...

Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics

By David Card and Stefano DellaVigna

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-five journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annua...

Uncertainty Measures for Economics Journal Impact Factors

By David I. Stern

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Academic economists appear to be intensely interested in rankings of journals, institutions, and individuals. Yet there is little discussion of the uncertainty associated with these rankings. To illustrate the uncertainty associated with citations-based r...

Bounded-Rationality Models: Tasks to Become Intellectually Competitive

By Ronald M. Harstad and Reinhard Selten

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Research in experimental economics has cogently challenged the fundamental precept of neoclassical economics that economic agents optimize. The last two decades have seen elaboration of boundedly rational models that try to move away from the optimizati...

Boundedly Rational versus Optimization-Based Models of Strategic Thinking and Learning in Games

By Vincent P. Crawford

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Harstad and Selten's article in this forum performs a valuable service by highlighting the dominance of optimization-based models over boundedly rational models in modern microeconomics, and questioning whether optimization-based models are a better wa...

Incorporating Limited Rationality into Economics

By Matthew Rabin

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Harstad and Selten (this forum) raise interesting questions about the relative promise of optimization models and bounded-rationality models in making progress in economics. This article builds from their analysis by indicating the potential for using n...

What Students Learn in Economics 101: Time for a Change

By Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

We make the case for a shift in what students learn in a first economics course, taking as our exemplar Paul Samuelson's paradigm-setting 1948 text. In the shadow of the Great Depression, Samuelson made Keynesian economics an essential component of what...

Reflections of a Textbook Author

By N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

In this essay, I reflect on textbook writing after three decades of participating in the activity. I address the following questions: What perspective should textbooks take? What is the best approach to teaching microeconomics? What is the best approach t...

Sins of Omission and the Practice of Economics

By George A. Akerlof

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2020

This paper advances the proposition that economics, as a discipline, gives rewards that favor the "hard" and disfavor the "soft." Such bias leads economic research to ignore important topics and problems that are difficult to approach in a "hard" way—th...

Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five

By James J. Heckman and Sidharth Moktan

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2020

This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in top five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments. Analyzing the job histories of tenure-track economists hired by the top 35 US economics departments, ...

Epidemics, Inequality, and Poverty in Preindustrial and Early Industrial Times

By Guido Alfani

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Recent research has explored the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics, and the current crisis triggered by COVID-19 prompts us to look at the past for insights about how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth, and health....

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and Its Lessons for COVID-19

By Brian Beach, Karen Clay, and Martin Saavedra

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

This article reviews the global health and economic consequences of the 1918 influenza pandemic, with a particular focus on topics that have seen a renewed interest because of COVID-19. We begin by providing an overview of key contextual and epidemiologic...

Modern Infectious Diseases: Macroeconomic Impacts and Policy Responses

By David E. Bloom, Michael Kuhn, and Klaus Prettner

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

We discuss and review literature on the macroeconomic effects of epidemics and pandemics since the late twentieth century. First, we cover the role of health in driving economic growth and well-being and discuss standard frameworks for assessing the eco...

The Economic Impact of the Black Death

By Remi Jedwab, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European history. We review the evidence for the origins, spread, and mortality of the disease. We document that it was a plausibly exogenous shock to the European economy and trace out its aggregate ...

Symposium: Race and Economic Literature—Introduction

By Trevon D. Logan and Samuel L. Myers Jr.

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

Stratification Economics: Core Constructs and Policy Implications

By Grieve Chelwa, Darrick Hamilton, and James Stewart

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article introduces the core constructs of stratification economics to provide a coherent explanation for the persistence of intergroup inequalities. Aligned with the critical race theory concept of "the property rights in Whiteness," stratification e...

Position and Possessions: Stratification Economics and Intergroup Inequality

By William A. Darity Jr.

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article provides an overview of the origins and development of stratification economics as a subfield that centers the importance of identity, social ranking, and relative group position. Stratification economics developed in response to explanations...

A Nation of Laws, and Race Laws

By Nina Banks and Warren C. Whatley

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article reviews the history of race laws in the United States as distinct from the rule of law, an idea found in the writing and speeches of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American PhD in economics (1921). We review the race laws o...

Black Economists on Race and Policy: Contributions to Education, Poverty and Mobility, and Public Finance

By Dania V. Francis, Bradley L. Hardy, and Damon Jones

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

We explore the contributions of Black economists to research on major economic and social policy problems in the United States. We focus on applications in education, poverty and economic mobility, and public finance to extract common themes and patterns....