What We Know and Do Not Know about the Natural Rate of Unemployment

[Symposium: The Natural Rate of Unemployment]

By Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Over the past three decades, much research has attempted to identify the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment. The authors reach two main conclusions about this body of work. First, there has been considerable theoretical progress over the pas...

Estimating Time Preferences from Convex Budgets

By James Andreoni and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Review, December 2012

Experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what seems reasonable for economic decision-making. Such high rates are often attributed to present-biased discounting. A well-known bias of standard measurements is the assumption of li...

The Impact of State Licensing Regulations on Low-Skilled Immigrants: The Case of Vietnamese Manicurists

By Maya N. Federman, David E. Harrington, and Kathy J. Krynski

American Economic Review, May 2006

Information Acquisition in Competitive Markets: An Application to the US Mortgage Market

By Jeremy M. Burke, Curtis R. Taylor, and Liad Wagman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2012

How do price commitments impact the amount of information firms acquire about potential customers? We examine this question in the context of a competitive market where firms search for information that may disqualify applicants. Contracts are incomplete ...

The Differential Effects of Bilateral Tax Treaties

By Bruce A. Blonigen, Lindsay Oldenski, and Nicholas Sly

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

Bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) are intended to promote foreign direct investment through double-taxation relief. Using BEA firm-level data, we find a positive effect of BTTs on FDI, which is larger for firms that use differentiated inputs. BTTs allow mu...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

By Andrew Postlewaite

American Economic Review, May 2010

Cable Modems and DSL: Broadband Internet Access for Residential Customers

By Jerry A. Hausman, J. Gregory Sidak, and HalJ. Singer

American Economic Review, May 2001

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

Helping Consumers Know Themselves

By Emir Kamenica, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Richard Thaler

American Economic Review, May 2011

Firms sometimes know more about a consumer's expected usage than the consumer herself. We explore the consequences of this reversal in the information asymmetry. We analyze the consequences of making consumers more informed about themselves. While making ...

Intergroup Economic Inequality in South Africa: The Post-apartheid Era

By George Sherer

American Economic Review, May 2000

An Equilibrium Model of "Global Imbalances" and Low Interest Rates

By Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

American Economic Review, March 2008

The sustained rise in US current account deficits, the stubborn decline in long-run real rates, and the rise in US assets in global portfolios appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional models. This paper rationalizes these facts as an eq...

The Cost of Reducing Gasoline Consumption

By Sarah E. West and Roberton C. Williams III

American Economic Review, May 2005

Comments

By Duncan K. Foley, Robert J. Gordon, and Thomas R. Michl

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

Preventing Crime Waves

By Philip Bond and Kathleen Hagerty

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2010

We study the design of enforcement mechanisms when enforcement resources are chosen ex ante and are inelastic ex post. Multiple equilibria arise naturally. We identify a new answer to the old question of why non-maximal penalties are used to punish modera...

Does Monetary Policy Affect Relative Educational Unemployment Rates?

By Philip N. Jefferson

American Economic Review, May 2005

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2012

Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture

By H. Peyton Young and Mary A. Burke

American Economic Review, June 2001

Survey data suggest that cropsharing contracts exhibit a much higher degree of uniformity than is warranted by economic fundamentals. We propose a dynamic model of contract choice to explain this phenomenon. Landowners and tenants recontract periodically,...

Puzzles: Cider in Your Ear, Continuing Dilemma, The Last Shall be First, More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

In presenting economic puzzles, I have three goals in mind: some puzzles are chosen to stimulate research; others offer examples that will help undergraduate and graduate teaching; all should provide quality distractions during seminars. As usual, this fe...

Stochastic Technical Progress, Smooth Trends, and Nearly Distinct Business Cycles

By Julio J. Rotemberg

American Economic Review, December 2003

This paper studies a model of random technical progress where technology diffuses at realistically slow rates. It fits smooth trends to the sum of GDP series generated by this model and series representing transitory, or cyclical, fluctuations. Detrended ...

Pervasive Stickiness

By N. Gregory Mankiw and Ricardo Reis

American Economic Review, May 2006