The Price of Nails since 1695: A Window into Economic Change

By Daniel E. Sichel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This paper focuses on the price of nails since 1695 and the proximate source of changes in those prices. Why nails? They are a basic manufactured product whose form and quality have changed relatively little over the last three centuries, yet the proces...

The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession

By Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This paper documents a set of facts about the dramatic decline in birth rates in the United States between 2007 and 2020 and explores possible explanations. The overall reduction in the birth rate reflects declines across many groups of women, including...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Labor Productivity Growth and Industrialization in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Margaret McMillan and Albert Zeufack

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Manufacturing has made an important contribution to raising living standards in many parts of the world. Concerns about premature deindustrialization have made some observers skeptical about the potential for manufacturing to play this role in Africa. B...

Agricultural Technology in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Tavneet Suri and Christopher Udry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

We discuss recent trends in agricultural productivity in Africa and highlight how technological progress in agriculture has stagnated on the continent. We briefly review the literature that tries to explain this stagnation through the lens of particular c...

Time Use and Gender in Africa in Times of Structural Transformation

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Taryn Dinkelman and L. Rachel Ngai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Many African countries are still in the early stages of structural transformation. Typically, as economies move through the structural transformation, activities once conducted within the household are outsourced to the market. This has particular impli...

Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Oriana Bandiera, Ahmed Elsayed, Andrea Smurra, and Céline Zipfel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Every year, millions of young adults join the labor market in Africa. This paper harmonizes surveys and censuses from 68 low- and middle-income countries to compare their job prospects to those of their counterparts in other low-income regions. We show th...

Isaiah Andrews, 2021 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Anna Mikusheva and Jesse M. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Isaiah Andrews is an exceptionally warm and caring person, a remarkable teacher, collaborator, and mentor, an exemplary contributor to his department and profession, and a brilliant econometrician. In this article, we review Isaiah's contributions to econ...

Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration

By Ellora Derenoncourt

American Economic Review, February 2022

This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940–1970) reduced the gains from growing up in the northern United States for Black families and can explain 27 percent of the region's racial upward mobility gap today. I iden...

Which Findings Should Be Published?

By Alexander Frankel and Maximilian Kasy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2022

Given a scarcity of journal space, what is the optimal rule for whether an empirical finding should be published? Suppose publications inform the public about a policy-relevant state. Then journals should publish extreme results, meaning ones that move be...

School Spending and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Revenue Limit Elections in Wisconsin

By E. Jason Baron

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2022

This study examines the impacts of two distinct types of school spending on student outcomes. State-imposed revenue limits cap the total amount of revenue that a school district in Wisconsin can raise unless the district holds a referendum asking voters t...

Recessions and educational attainment

[Page]

How does an economic downturn affect the likelihood that a child will go to college?

Publishing the most valuable findings

[Research Highlight]

January 28, 2022

What are the tradeoffs journal editors must weigh when choosing which papers to accept?

Pandemic bottlenecks, dementia, and big tech

[News]

January 28, 2022

Reading recommendations from Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Political turnover and education quality in Brazil

[Page]

How does political turnover affect the government bureaucracy and its performance?

NIPE's 18th Summer School on the Econometrics of Big Data

[News]

February 17, 2022

The Summer School will run from June 27-20, 2022.

Money well spent

[Research Highlight]

February 15, 2022

Jason Baron discusses the effects of different types of school spending on student outcomes.

Quarters vs. semesters

[Research Highlight]

February 09, 2022

How does switching to a different academic calendar impact students?

Semesters or Quarters? The Effect of the Academic Calendar on Postsecondary Student Outcomes

By Valerie Bostwick, Stefanie Fischer, and Matthew Lang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2022

There exists a long-standing debate in higher education on which academic calendar is optimal. Using panel data on the near universe of four-year nonprofit institutions and leveraging quasi-experimental variation in calendars across institutions and years...