Mindful Economics: The Production, Consumption, and Value of Beliefs

[Symposium: Motivated Beliefs]

By Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

In this paper, we provide a perspective into the main ideas and findings emerging from the growing literature on motivated beliefs and reasoning. This perspective emphasizes that beliefs often fulfill important psychological and functional needs of the in...

On Testing for Speculative Bubbles

[Symposium: Bubbles]

By Robert P. Flood and Robert J. Hodrick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

The possibility that movements in prices could be due to the self-fulfilling prophecies of market participants has long intrigued observers of free markets. This paper surveys the current state of the empirically-oriented literature concerning rational dy...

Shifting Mandates: The Federal Reserve's First Centennial

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, May 2013

The Federal Reserve's mandate has evolved considerably over the organization's hundred-year history. It was changed from an initial focus in 1913 on financial stability, to fiscal financing in World War II and its aftermath, to a strong anti-inflation foc...

Monopoly and the Incentive to Innovate When Adoption Involves Switchover Disruptions

By Thomas J. Holmes, David K. Levine, and James A. Schmitz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

Arrow (1962) argued that since a monopoly restricts output relative to a competitive industry, it would be less willing to pay a fixed cost to adopt a new technology. We develop a new theory of why a monopolistic industry innovates less. Firms often face ...

Gender Differences in Salary and Promotion in the Humanities

By Donna K. Ginther and Kathy J. Hayes

American Economic Review, May 1999

Are Biofuels the Culprit? OPEC, Food, and Fuel

By Gal Hochman, Deepak Rajagopal, and David Zilberman

American Economic Review, May 2010

Aid under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict

By Benjamin Crost, Joseph Felter, and Patrick Johnston

American Economic Review, June 2014

We estimate the causal effect of a large development program on conflict in the Philippines through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program. We find that barely eligible m...

Environmental Health Risks and Housing Values: Evidence from 1,600 Toxic Plant Openings and Closings

By Janet Currie, Lucas Davis, Michael Greenstone, and Reed Walker

American Economic Review, February 2015

Regulatory oversight of toxic emissions from industrial plants and understanding about these emissions' impacts are in their infancy. Applying a research design based on the openings and closings of 1,600 industrial plants to rich data on housing marke...

Was Electricity a General Purpose Technology? Evidence from Historical Patent Citations

By Petra Moser and Tom Nicholas

American Economic Review, May 2004

The Most Dangerous Idea in Federal Reserve History: Monetary Policy Doesn't Matter

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2013

Monetary policy-makers' beliefs about how the economy functions are a key determinant of the conduct of policy. That monetary policy has little impact under the prevailing circumstances is a belief which has resurfaced periodically over the Federal Reserv...

A Cautionary Tale about the Use of Administrative Data: Evidence from Age of Marriage Laws

By Rebecca M. Blank, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and James M. Sallee

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

This paper demonstrates that administrative data may be inferior to survey data under particular circumstances. We examine the effect of state laws governing the minimum age of marriage in the United States. The estimated effects of these laws are much...

Keeping It Simple: Financial Literacy and Rules of Thumb

By Alejandro Drexler, Greg Fischer, and Antoinette Schoar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Micro-entrepreneurs often lack the financial literacy required to make important financial decisions. We conducted a randomized evaluation with a bank in the Dominican Republic to compare the impact of two distinct programs: standard accounting trainin...

Organizing Debt Relief: The Need for a New Institution

[Symposium: New Institutions for Developing Country Debt]

By Peter B. Kenen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

In March 1989, the new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Nicholas Brady, endorsed a change in strategy for dealing with developing country debt, calling for a three-year waiver of clauses in existing loan agreements that stand in the way of debt reduction "...

Policy Watch: Tax Credits for Low-Income Workers with Children

By C. Eugene Steuerle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The most important tax credits available to low-income households with children are the earned income tax credit (EITC), the child tax credit, and the child and dependent care tax credit (hereafter, child-care credit). Only the EITC and the child-care cre...

Women's Quest for Economic Equality

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Victor R. Fuchs

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

The persistence of substantial gender inequality a quarter-century after the passage of major antidiscrimination legislation and several decades of massive social change poses a major problem for economic analysis and policy. Why are women at an economic ...

Fixed Effects, Invariance, and Spatial Variation in Intergenerational Mobility

By Gary Chamberlain

American Economic Review, May 2016

Chetty et al. (2014) document variation across commuting zones in intergenerational mobility. With over 700 commuting zones, the task of estimating place effects involves a high-dimension parameter space. I develop a fixed-effects model along with an orac...

Getting Prices Right: What Should Be Done?

[Symposium: Measuring the CPI]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

Much of the profession accepts that the CPI likely overstates the rate of increase of the cost-of-living. It is less clear that there are sound and feasible steps that the BLS can adopt to improve matters in the short run. There are unresolved conceptual ...

Optimal Life-Cycle Investing with Flexible Labor Supply: A Welfare Analysis of Life-Cycle Funds

By Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Luis M. Viceira

American Economic Review, May 2008

A Comment on CSWEP

By Milton Friedman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Milton Friedman corresponded with Carolyn Shaw Bell about the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) in 1973. What follows is a distillation of those remarks.

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008