Nonlinear Pricing with Average-Price Bias

By David Martimort and Lars A. Stole

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Empirical evidence suggests that consumers facing complex nonlinear prices often make choices based on average (not marginal) prices. Given such behavior, we characterize a monopolist's optimal nonlinear price schedule. In contrast to the textbook setting...

The DNA of New Exporters: Spin-offs and FDI at the Extensive Margin of Trade

By Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro, Ignatius Horstmann, and Trevor Tombe

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Other than that new exporters account for a large part of aggregate export growth, we know little else. We document that aggregate export growth in Chile is driven by only a few new exporters. These exporters are new business entities, operate new plants,...

History Lessons: Sanctions - Neither War nor Peace

By Lance Davis and Stanley Engerman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

This paper surveys the increasing international use of sanctions over the past century. Sanctions are a form of action taken by one state or by collective action to influence another state to change its behavior, as a substitute for welfare. They generall...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

Explaining the Decline in the US Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence

By Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

This paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2018. Population aging has had...

Model Averaging and Its Use in Economics

By Mark F. J. Steel

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

The method of model averaging has become an important tool to deal with model uncertainty, for example in situations where a large amount of different theories exist, as are common in economics. Model averaging is a natural and formal response to mode...

The Road to Serfdom after 75 Years

By Bruce Caldwell

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

This paper revisits Friedrich Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of its publication. Though the book is well-known, its arguments are often mischaracterized. The paper traces the origins of the book, noting the va...

Where Economics Went Wrong: A Review Essay

By Marianne Johnson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

In their recent book, Where Economics Went Wrong, David Colander and Craig Freedman (2019) argue that economics went wrong when it abandoned the Classical liberal firewall that demanded separation of scientific theory from the art of policy m...

Commanding Nature by Obeying Her: A Review Essay on Joel Mokyr's A Culture of Growth

By Enrico Spolaore

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occu...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2020

Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. González, and David Yanagizawa-Drott

American Economic Review, October 2020

We show that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support women working outside the home (WWOH) and substantially underestimate support by other similar men. Correcting these beliefs increases men's (costly) willingness to help...

Business-Cycle Anatomy

By George-Marios Angeletos, Fabrice Collard, and Harris Dellas

American Economic Review, October 2020

We propose a new strategy for dissecting the macroeconomic time series, provide a template for the business-cycle propagation mechanism that best describes the data, and use its properties to appraise models of both the parsimonious and the medium-scale v...

Patronage and Selection in Public Sector Organizations

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Mounu Prem, and Edoardo Teso

American Economic Review, October 2020

In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public employment decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections substitute for individual competence. Relying on detailed matched employer-employ...

Liquidity versus Wealth in Household Debt Obligations: Evidence from Housing Policy in the Great Recession

By Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel

American Economic Review, October 2020

We exploit variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments ("wealth"), and reducing short-term payments with no change in long-term obligations ("liquidity"). Using regr...

Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure

By David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi

American Economic Review, October 2020

Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of US politics? Analyzing multiple measures of political expression and results of congressional and presidential elections spanning the period 2000 through 2016, we find strong though not de...