The American Family and Family Economics

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family (1981) subjected individuals' decisions about sex, marriage, childbearing, and childrearing to rational choice analysis. The American family has changed radically in recent decades; we survey these change...

Why Did Productivity Fall So Much during the Great Depression?

By Lee E. Ohanian

American Economic Review, May 2001

Making the Transition to Prepaid Medicare

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By Thomas R. Saving

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The Medicare system is facing a financial crisis brought on by the combination of rapidly rising consumption of health care services by beneficiaries and financing based on generation transfers. This paper simulates a transition to prepaid Medicare where ...

Report: American Economic Association Committee on Statistics (AEAStat)

By Robert Moffitt

American Economic Review, May 2016

Cognitive Abilities and Household Financial Decision Making

By Sumit Agarwal and Bhashkar Mazumder

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example features the optimal use of credit cards for convenience transactions after a balance transfer and t...

Federal Reserve Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public by examining Federal Reserve and commercial inflation forecasts. It demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has considerable information about inflation ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1995

Identity-Based Organizations

By Jean-Paul Carvalho

American Economic Review, May 2016

A single club model describes the collective production of both personal and social identity. Personal identity, how one perceives oneself, is formed through a process of cultural transmission. Social identity, how one is perceived by others, takes the fo...

Labor Contracts, Equal Treatment, and Wage-Unemployment Dynamics

By Andy Snell and Jonathan P. Thomas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

This paper analyses a model in which firms cannot pay discriminate based on year of entry. It is assumed that workers can costlessly quit at any time, while firms are committed to contracts. We solve for the dynamics of wages and unemployment, and show th...

Policy Watch: Proposals for Time-Limited Welfare

By Rebecca M. Blank

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

This paper summarizes the Clinton administration's welfare reform proposal and views the available evidence on the effects of time-limiting cash assistance and requiring work among long-term Aid to Families with Dependent Children users. The reforms are d...

The Dividend Clientele Hypothesis: Evidence from the 2003 Tax Act

By Laura Kawano

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

This paper provides evidence that dividend and capital gains tax rates importantly influence household portfolio choices. Using data from the Surveys of Consumer Finances around the 2003 dividend tax reductions, I estimate the relationship between taxe...

Gridlock: Ethnic Diversity in Government and the Provision of Public Goods

By Brian Beach and Daniel B. Jones

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

How does ethnic diversity in government impact public good provision? We construct a novel dataset linking the ethnicity of California city council candidates to election outcomes and expenditure decisions. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we fi...

Structural Change, Growth, and Volatility

By Alessio Moro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

I construct a two-sector general equilibrium model of structural change to study the impact of sectoral composition of gross domestic product (GDP) on cross-country differences in GDP growth and volatility. For an empirically relevant parametrization of s...

Market Maker Inventories and Stock Prices

By Terrence Hendershott and Mark S. Seasholes

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Demand for, and Impact of, Learning HIV Status

By Rebecca L. Thornton

American Economic Review, December 2008

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 ...

Real Business Cycles: A New Keynesian Perspective

[Symposium: Real Business Cycles]

By N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

Real business cycle theory is the latest incarnation of the classical view of economic fluctuations. It assumes that there are large random fluctuations in the rate of technological change. In response to these fluctuations, individuals rationally alter t...

Irving B. Kravis: Memoir of a Distinguished Fellow

By Lawrence R. Klein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

The nomination of Irving Kravis as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 1991 crowned a long and distinguished career. He would go on to no further accomplishments, for it was on the trip to the ASSA meetings in New Orleans to rec...

Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities: Reply

By Jan Eeckhout

American Economic Review, September 2009

This reply refutes the objection raised by Levy (2009) about the fit of the upper tail of the city size distribution in Eeckhout (2004). I show that the method on which his conclusion is based is unsubstantiated. The visual interpretation of the fit on lo...

Robust Control and Model Uncertainty

By LarsPeter Hansen and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Review, May 2001

VAT Base Broadening, Self Supply, and the Informal Sector

By John Piggott and John Whalley

American Economic Review, September 2001