The (Paper)Work of Medicine: Understanding International Medical Costs

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By David M. Cutler and Dan P. Ly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

This paper draws on international evidence on medical spending to examine what the United States can learn about making its healthcare system more efficient. We focus primarily on understanding contemporaneous differences in the level of spending, general...

The Economic Effects of Climate Change

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Richard S. J. Tol

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

I review the literature on the economic impacts of climate change, an externality that is unprecedentedly large, complex, and uncertain. Only 14 estimates of the total damage cost of climate change have been published, a research effort that is in sharp c...

Teachers' Views on No Child Left Behind: Support for the Principles, Concerns about the Practices

[Symposium: No Child Left Behind]

By Richard J. Murnane and John P. Papay

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

In this article, we describe teachers' views of the behavioral responses the No Child Left Behind legislation has elicited and the extent to which research reveals evidence of these responses and their effects on the distribution of student achievement. W...

Evolution of the Marriage Earnings Gap for Women

By Chinhui Juhn and Kristin McCue

American Economic Review, May 2016

Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panels linked to Social Security earnings records, we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975. We compare ordinary least squares and fixed-ef...

Markets: State Franchise Laws, Dealer Terminations, and the Auto Crisis

By Francine Lafontaine and Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

In fall 2008, General Motors and Chrysler were both on the brink of bankruptcy, and Ford was not far behind. As the government stepped in and restructuring began, GM and Chrysler announced their plan to terminate about 2,200 dealerships. In this paper, we...

Risk and Global Economic Architecture: Why Full Financial Integration May Be Undesirable

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, May 2010

Supply and Demand for Discrimination: Strategic Revelation of Own Characteristics in a Trust Game

By Anthony Heyes and John A. List

American Economic Review, May 2016

In strategic settings a player may be able to influence the behavior of an opponent by revealing information about their own characteristics. They may for example aim to exploit stereotypes held by others. We provide an experimental test of this. A substa...

Crises and Capital Requirements in Banking

By Alan D. Morrison and Lucy White

American Economic Review, December 2005

We analyze a general equilibrium model in which there is both adverse selection of, and moral hazard by, banks. The regulator can screen banks prior to giving them a licence, audit them ex post to learn the success probability of their projects, and impos...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1992

Capitalism and Socialism: A Review of Kornai's Dynamism, Rivalry, and the Surplus Economy

By Chenggang Xu

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

Understanding the nature of capitalism has been a central theme of economics. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the global financial crisis spurred the reemergence of the political economy as a new frontier and the revival of interest in the nature of ...

Liquidity and Insurance for the Unemployed

By Robert Shimer and Ivan Werning

American Economic Review, December 2008

We study unemployment insurance for workers who sequentially sample job opportunities. We focus on the optimal timing of benefits and the desirability of allowing borrowing and saving. When workers have constant absolute risk aversion, a simple policy ...

Katrina's Children: Evidence on the Structure of Peer Effects from Hurricane Evacuees

By Scott A. Imberman, Adriana D. Kugler, and Bruce I. Sacerdote

American Economic Review, August 2012

In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita forced many children to relocate across the Southeast. While schools quickly enrolled evacuees, families in receiving schools worried about the impacts on incumbent students. We find no effect, on average, of the inflo...

Price Cutting and Business Stealing in Imperfect Cartels

By B. Douglas Bernheim and Erik Madsen

American Economic Review, February 2017

Although economists have made substantial progress toward formulating theories of collusion in industrial cartels that account for a variety of fact patterns, important puzzles remain. Standard models of repeated interaction formalize the observation that...

Raj Chetty: 2013 Clark Medal Recipient

By Martin Feldstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Raj Chetty is eminently deserving of being awarded the John Bates Clark Medal at the age of 33. His research has transformed the field of public economics. His work is motivated by important public policy issues in the fields of taxation, social insurance...

The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto

By George R. Boyer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

This paper attempts to place the economic analysis of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto in historical perspective. The author begins by summarizing the analysis of capitalist economic development in the Manifesto, and showing how it was...

Asset Pricing with Distorted Beliefs: Are Equity Returns Too Good to Be True?

By Stephen G. Cecchetti, Pok-sang Lam, and Nelson C. Mark

American Economic Review, September 2000

We study a Lucas asset-pricing model that is standard in all respects, except that the representative agent's subjective beliefs about endowment growth are distorted. Using constant relative risk-aversion (CRRA) utility, with a CRRA coefficient below 10; ...

Retrospectives: What Did the Ancient Greeks Mean by Oikonomia?

By Dotan Leshem

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Nearly every economist has at some point in the standard coursework been exposed to a brief explanation that the origin of the word "economy" can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomia, which in turn is composed of two words: oikos, whic...

Spatial Differentiation and Vertical Mergers in Retail Markets for Gasoline

By Jean-François Houde

American Economic Review, August 2012

This paper studies an empirical model of spatial competition applied to gasoline markets. The main feature is to specify commuting paths as the "locations" of consumers in a Hotelling-style model. As a result, spatial differentiation depends in an intuiti...

Economic Education in U.S. High Schools

By William B. Walstad

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

The teaching of economics at the high school level is vital for increasing basic economic literacy. This assessment of high school economics in the United States covers seven topics: enrollments in courses; course content; the testing of students; achieve...

The Economic Benefits from Immigration

[Symposium: Immigration]

By George J. Borjas

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently 'different' from the stock of native productive input...