The Persistent Effects of Initial Labor Market Conditions for Young Adults and Their Sources

By Till von Wachter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium- to long-term consequences. This paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career devel...

Retrospectives: Regulating Banks versus Managing Liquidity: Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton in 1802

By John Berdell and Thomas Mondschean

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

At nearly the same moment, Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton adopted diametrically opposed approaches to stabilizing the financial system. Henry Thornton eloquently defended the Bank of England's actions as the lender of last resort and saw its discreti...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Does Antitrust Policy Improve Consumer Welfare? Assessing the Evidence

[Symposium: Activist Antitrust?]

By Robert W. Crandall and Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

This paper reviews the literature and assesses the effects of antitrust policy and enforcement on consumer welfare. We find no evidence that antitrust policy in the areas of monopolization, collusion, and mergers has provided much benefit to consumers and...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2020

Competition and Entry in Agricultural Markets: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

By Lauren Falcao Bergquist and Michael Dinerstein

American Economic Review, December 2020

African agricultural markets are characterized by low farmer revenues and high consumer food prices. Many have worried that this wedge is partially driven by imperfect competition among intermediaries. This paper provides experimental evidence from Kenya ...

Discounts and Deadlines in Consumer Search

By Dominic Coey, Bradley J. Larsen, and Brennan C. Platt

American Economic Review, December 2020

We present a new equilibrium search model where consumers initially search among discount opportunities, but are willing to pay more as a deadline approaches, eventually turning to full-price sellers. The model predicts equilibrium price dispersion and ra...

The Case for Antitrust Enforcement

[Symposium: Activist Antitrust?]

By Jonathan B. Baker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

This paper provides evidence of the necessity and success of antitrust enforcement. It begins with examples of socially beneficial antitrust challenges by the federal antitrust agencies to price-fixing and other forms of collusion; to mergers that appear ...

A Model of Competing Narratives

By Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler

American Economic Review, December 2020

We formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a "clash of narratives." Drawing on the "Bayesian Networks" literature, we represent a narrative by a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection of other ra...

A Few Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: An Anti-folk Theorem for Anonymous Repeated Games with Incomplete Information

By Takuo Sugaya and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, December 2020

We study anonymous repeated games where players may be "commitment types" who always take the same action. We establish a stark anti-folk theorem: if the distribution of the number of commitment types satisfies a smoothness condition and the game has a "p...

Screening and Selection: The Case of Mammograms

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Tamar Oostrom, Abigail Ostriker, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, December 2020

We analyze selection into screening in the context of recommendations that breast cancer screening start at age 40. Combining medical claims with a clinical oncology model, we document that compliers with the recommendation are less likely to have cancer ...

Missing Events in Event Studies: Identifying the Effects of Partially Measured News Surprises

By Refet S. Gürkaynak, Burçin Kisacikoğlu, and Jonathan H. Wright

American Economic Review, December 2020

Macroeconomic news announcements are elaborate and multi-dimensional. We consider a framework in which jumps in asset prices around announcements reflect both the response to observed surprises in headline numbers and to latent factors, reflecting other n...

What Makes a Rule Complex?

By Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, December 2020

We study the complexity of rules by paying experimental subjects to implement a series of algorithms and then eliciting their willingness-to-pay to avoid implementing them again in the future. The design allows us to examine hypotheses from the theoretica...

Changing Business Dynamism and Productivity: Shocks versus Responsiveness

By Ryan A. Decker, John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review, December 2020

The pace of job reallocation has declined in the United States in recent decades. We draw insight from canonical models of business dynamics in which reallocation can decline due to (i) lower dispersion of idiosyncratic shocks faced by businesses, or (ii)...

Detecting Potential Overbilling in Medicare Reimbursement via Hours Worked: Comment

By Brett Matsumoto

American Economic Review, December 2020

Fang and Gong (2017) develop a procedure to detect potential overbilling of Medicare by physicians. In their empirical analysis, they use aggregated claims data that can overstate the number of services performed due to features of Medicare billing. In th...

Detecting Potential Overbilling in Medicare Reimbursement via Hours Worked: Reply

By Hanming Fang and Qing Gong

American Economic Review, December 2020

Matsumoto (2020) pointed out data and coding errors in Fang and Gong (2017). We show that these errors have limited impacts: all qualitative findings remain after correcting them. Matsumoto also discussed potential service overcounting in the aggregated u...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

The Unholy Trinity of Financial Contagion

[Symposium: International Financial Architecture]

By Graciela L. Kaminsky, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Carlos A. Végh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

Over the last 20 years, some financial events, such as devaluations or defaults, have triggered an immediate adverse chain reaction in other countries--which we call fast and furious contagion. Yet, on other occasions, similar events have failed to trigge...

Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?

By Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaule

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

A better understanding of the determinants of idea/knowledge production remains critical for long-run growth. Toward this end, this paper establishes two results using data from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). First, individuals who excelle...