Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, o...

What Happened: Financial Factors in the Great Recession

[Symposium: Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession]

By Mark Gertler and Simon Gilchrist

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

At the onset of the recent global financial crisis, the workhorse macroeconomic models assumed frictionless financial markets. These frameworks were thus not able to anticipate the crisis, nor to analyze how the disruption of credit markets changed what i...

Reducing Child Mortality in the Last Mile: Experimental Evidence on Community Health Promoters in Uganda

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Andrea Guariso, Jakob Svensson, and David Yanagizawa-Drott

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

The delivery of basic health products and services remains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mortality is high. This paper shows the results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of a novel approach to health care delivery. In randomly sel...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

How Prevalent Is Downward Rigidity in Nominal Wages? International Evidence from Payroll Records and Pay Slips

By Michael W. L. Elsby and Gary Solon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. Contrary evidence from household surveys reasonably has been discounted on the grounds that the measurement of frequen...

Gender Bias and Temporal Effects in Standard Evaluations of Teaching

By Whitney Buser, Jill Hayter, and Emily C. Marshall

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This study investigates whether gender differences in SET vary over the course of a semester, particularly in response to feedback from the instructor. We survey principles of economics courses at multiple institutions three times during the semester to a...

Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?

By Peter Harasztosi and Attila Lindner

American Economic Review, August 2019

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the margins along which firms responded to a large and persistent minimum wage increase in Hungary. We show that employment elasticities are negative but small even four years after the reform; that around...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Using JEP Articles as Course Readings? Tell Us About It!

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Casting a Wider Tax Net: Experimental Evidence from Costa Rica

By Anne Brockmeyer, Spencer Smith, Marco Hernandez, and Stewart Kettle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

The majority of firms in developing countries are informal, yet even among registered firms, tax filing rates are low. We argue that non-filing of taxes among registered firms constitutes an important intermediate form of informality, which can be tackled...

Are Price-Cost Markups Rising in the United States? A Discussion of the Evidence

[Symposium: Markups]

By Susanto Basu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypo...

A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice

By Joshua B. Miller and Adam Sanjurjo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

We show how classic conditional probability puzzles, such as the Monty Hall problem, are intimately related to the recently discovered hot hand selection bias. We explain the connection by way of the principle of restricted choice, an intuitive inferentia...

Microeconomic Heterogeneity and Macroeconomic Shocks

[Symposium: Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession]

By Greg Kaplan and Giovanni L. Violante

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

In this essay, we discuss the emerging literature in macroeconomics that combines heterogeneous agent models, nominal rigidities, and aggregate shocks. This literature opens the door to the analysis of distributional issues, economic fluctuations, and sta...

Stimulating the Vote: ARRA Road Spending and Vote Share

By Emiliano Huet-Vaughn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

This paper estimates the impact of public good spending on voting behavior in the United States, using a quasi-experimental design and the distribution of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) road projects in New Jersey. I find an approximate 1.5...

Economists (and Economics) in Tech Companies

By Susan Athey and Michael Luca

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

As technology platforms have created new markets and new ways of acquiring information, economists have come to play an increasingly central role in tech companies-tackling problems such as platform design, strategy, pricing, and policy. Over the past f...

Exchange-Traded Funds 101 for Economists

By Martin Lettau and Ananth Madhavan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) represent one of the most important financial innovations in decades. An ETF is an investment vehicle, with a specific architecture that typically seeks to track the performance of a specific index. The first US-listed ETF, ...

Do Increasing Markups Matter? Lessons from Empirical Industrial Organization

[Symposium: Markups]

By Steven Berry, Martin Gaynor, and Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

This article considers the recent literature on firm markups in light of both new and classic work in the field of industrial organization. We detail the shortcomings of papers that rely on discredited approaches from the "structure-conduct-performance"...

The Impact of Brexit on Foreign Investment and Production

By Ellen R. McGrattan and Andrea Waddle

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

Using simulations from a multicountry neoclassical growth model, we analyze several post-Brexit scenarios. First, the United Kingdom unilaterally imposes tighter restrictions on FDI and trade from other EU nations. Second, the European Union retaliates an...

Some Journal of Economic Perspectives Articles Recommended for Classroom Use

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

In 2018, the editors of the Journal of Economic Perspectives invited faculty to send us examples of JEP articles that they had found useful for teaching. We received 250 responses. On the JEP website, we have created a landing page (http...

Protecting Competition in the American Economy: Merger Control, Tech Titans, Labor Markets

[Symposium: Issues in Antitrust]

By Carl Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Accumulating evidence points to the need for more vigorous antitrust enforcement in the United States in three areas. First, stricter merger control is warranted in an economy where large, highly efficient and profitable "superstar" firms account for an i...