Retrospectives: Ceteris Paribus

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

In Webster's Dictionary is an example of how to use "ceteris paribus": [S]taple-growing states are, ceteris paribus, more favorable to slave labor than manufacturing states." I suspect it would take a minor treatise to elucidate fully the ceteris paribus ...

Behavior Policies and Teen Traffic Safety

By Thomas S. Dee and William N. Evans

American Economic Review, May 2001

Selective versus Universal Vouchers: Modelling Median Voter Preferences in Education

By Zhiqi Chen and Edwin G. West

American Economic Review, December 2000

The Politics of Financial Development: A Review of Calomiris and Haber's Fragile by Design

By Peter L. Rousseau

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Fragile by Design by Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber introduces a framework for understanding financial crises and credit abundance with politics at its center. Using the historical experiences of five nations to illustrate, the authors...

Polarization and Ambiguity

By Sandeep Baliga, Eran Hanany, and Peter Klibanoff

American Economic Review, December 2013

We offer a theory of polarization as an optimal response to ambiguity. Suppose individual A's beliefs first-order stochastically dominate individual B's. They observe a common signal. They exhibit polarization if A's posterior dominates her prior and B'...

Tax-Motivated Trading by Individual Investors

By Zoran Ivković, James Poterba, and Scott Weisbenner

American Economic Review, December 2005

We analyze stock trades made by individuals holding stock in both taxable and tax-deferred accounts. By comparing trades across these two types of accounts, we uncover a capital gains lock-in effect in taxable accounts. The lock-in effect is more pronounc...

Freedom Fries

By Guy Michaels and Xiaojia Zhi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Do firms always choose the cheapest suitable inputs, or can group attitudes affect their choices? To investigate this question, we examine the deterioration of relations between the United States and France from 2002-2003, when France's favorability ratin...

New Directions in National Economic Accounting

By William D. Nordhaus

American Economic Review, May 2000

Forecasting the Recovery from the Great Recession: Is This Time Different?

By Kathryn M. E. Dominguez and Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper asks whether the slow recovery of the US economy from the trough of the Great Recession was anticipated, and identifies some of the factors that contributed to surprises in the course of the recovery. We construct a narrative using news reports...

Generalizing the Taylor Principle: Comment

By Roger E. A. Farmer, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha

American Economic Review, March 2010

Troy Davig and Eric Leeper (2007) have proposed a condition they call the generalized Taylor principle to rule out indeterminate equilibria in a version of the new-Keynesian model where the parameters of the policy rule follow a Markov-switching process....

The Increased Frequency and Duration of the Postdoctorate Career Stage

By Paula Stephan and Jennifer Ma

American Economic Review, May 2005

Life Is Not Easy: Mexico's Quest for Stability and Growth

[Symposium: The North American Economy]

By Nora Lustig

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

In the wake of the debt crisis in 1982, Mexico adopted far reaching reforms but growth and stability remained elusive for many years. At present, the reforms and NAFTA seem to be finally paying off: inflation for 2000 is close to 10 percent and output per...

Corrigendum: Language, Meaning, and Games: A Model of Communication, Coordination, and Evolution

By Stefano Demichelis and Jörgen W. Weibull

American Economic Review, December 2009

Retrospectives: An Early Supply-Side-Demand-Side Controversy: Petty, Law, Cantillon

By John Berdell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

Early modern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented increase in the rate of economic growth, and governments entertained a wide range of proposals aimed at developing and harnessing foreign trade and emerg...

A Theory of Defensive Skill-Biased Innovation and Globalization

By Mathias Thoenig and Thierry Verdier

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper considers a dynamic model of innovations in which firms can endogenously bias the direction of technological change. Both in a North-North and North-South context, we show that, when globalization triggers an increased threat of technological l...

When Is It Optimal to Delegate: The Theory of Fast-Track Authority

By Levent Celik, Bilgehan Karabay, and John McLaren

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

With fast-track authority (FTA), the US Congress delegates trade policy authority to the president by committing not to amend a trade agreement. Why would it cede such power? We suggest an interpretation in which Congress uses FTA to forestall destructive...

Sunk Costs and Antitrust Barriers to Entry

By Rchard Schmalensee

American Economic Review, May 2004

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

Endogenous Technological Change and Wage Inequality

By Huw Lloyd-Ellis

American Economic Review, March 1999

Although microeconomic studies find a positive relationship between R&D and skill premia, much of the recent rise in U.S. wage inequality was accompanied by slowing labor-productivity growth and relatively slow introduction of new technologies. These conf...

Emerging Market Currency Excess Returns

By Stephen Gilmore and Fumio Hayashi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2011

We consider the excess return from 20 internationally tradable emerging market (EM) currencies against the US dollar. It has two contributions. First, we document stylized facts about EM currencies. EM currencies have provided significant equity-like exce...