Inflation Expectations and Readiness to Spend: Cross-Sectional Evidence

By Rüdiger Bachmann, Tim O. Berg, and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

There have been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations to stimulate spending. We examine the relationship between expected inflation and spending attitudes using the microdata from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The i...

Ideology, Economic Policy, and Economic History: Cohen and DeLong's Concrete Economics

By Alexander J. Field

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong view US economic policy extending up to 1980 as pragmatically fostering growth. This they interpret as the Hamiltonian tradition, and their intent is to rescue policy debate from the data- and logic-free quagmire in...

Retrospectives: The Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life

By H. Spencer Banzhaf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2014

This paper traces the history of the "Value of Statistical Life" (VSL), which today is used routinely in benefit-cost analysis of life-saving investments. The "value of statistical life" terminology was introduced by Thomas Schelling (1968) in his essay, ...

Labor Market Heterogeneity and the Aggregate Matching Function

By Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

We estimate an aggregate matching function and find that the regression residual, which captures movements in matching efficiency, displays procyclical fluctuations and a dramatic decline after 2007. Using a matching function framework that explicitly tak...

Progress in Behavioral Game Theory

By Colin F. Camerer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

Behavioral game theory aims to predict how people actually behave by incorporating psychological elements and learning into game theory. With this goal in mind, experimental findings can be organized into three categories: players have systematic 'recipro...

Promoting Healthy Choices: Information versus Convenience

By Jessica Wisdom, Julie S. Downs, and George Loewenstein

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Success in slowing obesity trends would benefit from policies aimed at reducing calorie consumption. In a field experiment at a fast-food sandwich chain, we address the effects of providing calorie information, mimicking recent legislation, and test an...

The Economics of Nationalism

By Xiaohuan Lan and Ben G. Li

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

This paper provides an economic framework for examining how economic openness affects nationalism. Within a country, a region's level of nationalism varies according to its economic interests in its domestic market relative to its foreign market. All else...

The New Life Cycle of Women's Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middles, Expanding Tops

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Goldin and Joshua Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

A new life cycle of women's employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, life-cycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak, and then declined starting in the fifties. The new life cy...

Escaping the Great Recession

By Francesco Bianchi and Leonardo Melosi

American Economic Review, April 2017

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures...

A Review of Enrico Moretti's The New Geography of Jobs

By Edward Glaeser

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Why is prosperity distributed so unevenly across America's metropolitan areas? While population growth has gone disproportionately towards the Sunbelt, high-skill areas have experienced the strongest income growth since 1970. Gaps between more and less...

Internal Labor Migration as a Shock Coping Strategy: Evidence from a Typhoon

By André Gröger and Yanos Zylberberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

We analyze how internal labor migration facilitates shock coping in rural economies. Employing high-precision satellite data, we identify objective variations in the inundations generated by a catastrophic typhoon in Vietnam and match them with household ...

National Money as a Barrier to International Trade: The Real Case for Currency Union

By Andrew K. Rose and Eric van Wincoop

American Economic Review, May 2001

The (Human) Sampler's Curses

By Mark Thordal-Le Quement

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

We present a cheap talk model in which a receiver (R) sequentially consults multiple experts who are either unbiased or wish to maximize R's action, bias being unobservable. Consultation is costly and R cannot commit to future consultation behavior. We fi...

Executive Compensation: A Modern Primer

By Alex Edmans and Xavier Gabaix

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

This article studies traditional and modern theories of executive compensation, bringing them together under a simple unifying framework accessible to the general-interest reader. We analyze assignment models of the level of pay, and static and dynamic mo...

Male Is a Gender, Too: A Review of Why Gender Matters in Economics by Mukesh Eswaran

By Julie A. Nelson

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

Mukesh Eswaran's Why Gender Matters in Economics presents a generally well-researched review of the literature on women and economics, and admirably attempts take a global perspective. Eswaran's analysis is compromised, however, by an unreflective ...

What Is European Integration Really About? A Political Guide for Economists

[Symposium: The Euro]

By Enrico Spolaore

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

Europe's monetary union is part of a broader process of integration that started in the aftermath of World War II. In this "political guide for economists," we look at the creation of the euro within the bigger picture of European integration. How and w...

Urban Evolutions: The Fast, the Slow, and the Still

By Gilles Duranton

American Economic Review, March 2007

With the use of French and US data, new and systematic evidence is provided about the rapid location changes of industries across cities (the fast). Cities are also slowly moving up and down the urban hierarchy (the slow), while the size distribution o...

Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities

By Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

This paper derives optimal top tax rate formulas in a model where top earners respond to taxes through three channels: labor supply, tax avoidance, and compensation bargaining. The optimal top tax rate increases when there are zero-sum compensation-bar...

Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century

By Melissa Dell, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

This paper uses historical fluctuations in temperature within countries to identify its effects on aggregate economic outcomes. We find three primary results. First, higher temperatures substantially reduce economic growth in poor countries. Second, high...

The Impact of NAFTA on the United States

[Symposium: The North American Economy]

By Mary E. Burfisher, Sherman Robinson, and Karen Thierfelder

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

We describe the main economic arguments posed for and against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during the U.S. policy debate. To evaluate these arguments, we analyze recent trade data and survey post-NAFTA studies. We find that both the U.S...