The Rise and Fall of Unions: The Public Sector and the Private

[Symposium: Explaining Savings]

By Melvin W. Reder

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

This paper has a single purpose: to explain why unionism (interpreted as percentage of union adherents among eligible employees) has been declining in the private sector for the past 30 to 35 years, but, for most of this period, has been increasing in the...

Interactions between Unmarried Fathers and Their Children: The Role of Paternity Establishment and Child-Support Policies

By Laura M. Argys and H. Elizabeth Peters

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Price of Gasoline and New Vehicle Fuel Economy: Evidence from Monthly Sales Data

By Thomas Klier and Joshua Linn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

This paper uses a unique dataset of monthly new vehicle sales by detailed model from 1978 to 2007, and implements a new identification strategy to estimate the effect of the price of gasoline on individual vehicle model sales. We control for unobserved ve...

The Voracity Effect

By Aaron Tornell and Philip R. Lane

American Economic Review, March 1999

The authors analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal-political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups. Powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate ca...

Minimum Wages and Earnings Inequality in Urban Mexico

By Mariano Bosch and Marco Manacorda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all of the growt...

Contingent Valuation: From Dubious to Hopeless

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By Jerry Hausman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Approximately 20 years ago, Peter Diamond and I wrote an article for this journal analyzing contingent valuation methods. At that time Peter's view was that contingent valuation was hopeless, while I was dubious but somewhat more optimistic. But 20 years ...

Incentives and Discrimination

By Eyal Winter

American Economic Review, June 2004

The Ethology of Homo Economicus

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

Early critics of John Stuart Mill attacked him for creating a monomaniacal economic man concerned only with the accumulation of money. In fact, Mill's construct possessed a considerably richer psychology including desires for leisure, luxury, and sexual r...

Making a Name: Women's Surnames at Marriage and Beyond

By Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

This paper tracks the fraction of college graduate women who kept their surnames upon marriage and after childbirth and explores some of the correlates of surname retention. Data from the New York Times, Harvard College alumni books, and Massachusetts bir...

The Role of Family in Family Firms

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Marianne Bertrand and Antoinette Schoar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

History is replete with examples of spectacular ascents of family businesses. Yet there are also numerous accounts of family businesses brought down by bitter feuds among family members, disappointed expectations between generations, and tragic sagas of l...

Second-Best Institutions

By Dani Rodrik

American Economic Review, May 2008

Are There Missing Girls in the United States? Evidence from Birth Data

By Jason Abrevaya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We offer evidence of gender selection within the United States. Analysis of comprehensive birth data shows unusually high boy-birth percentages after 1980 among later children (most notably third and fourth children) born to Chinese and Asian Indian mo...

A Neoclassical Perspective on Budget Deficits

[Symposium: Budget Deficit]

By B. Douglas Bernheim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

Generally speaking, there are three schools of thought concerning the economic effects of budget deficits: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Ricardian. It is remarkable that from among these three schools of thought, one can find support for every conceivable ...

The Natural Rate of Interest and Its Usefulness for Monetary Policy

By Robert Barsky, Alejandro Justiniano, and Leonardo Melosi

American Economic Review, May 2014

We estimate a state-of-the-art DSGE model to study the natural rate of interest in the United States over the last 20 years. The natural rate is highly procyclical, and fell substantially below zero in each of the last three recessions. Although the drop ...

Estimating the Knowledge-Capital Model of the Multinational Enterprise: Reply

By David L. Carr, James R. Markusen, and Keith E. Maskus

American Economic Review, June 2003

Rational Inattention to Discrete Choices: A New Foundation for the Multinomial Logit Model

By Filip Matějka and Alisdair McKay

American Economic Review, January 2015

Individuals must often choose among discrete actions with imperfect information about their payoffs. Before choosing, they have an opportunity to study the payoffs, but doing so is costly. This creates new choices such as the number of and types of questi...

Conscription and Crime: Evidence from the Argentine Draft Lottery

By Sebastian Galiani, Martín A. Rossi, and Ernesto Schargrodsky

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

We estimate the causal effect of mandatory participation in military service on individuals' subsequent involvement in criminal activities. To identify this causal effect, we exploit the random assignment of young men to conscription in Argentina through...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2015

Voluntary Export Restraints on Automobiles: Evaluating a Trade Policy

By Steven Berry, James Levinsohn, and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, June 1999

The authors evaluate the voluntary export restraint that was initially placed on exports of automobiles from Japan in 1981. They evaluate the impact this policy had on U.S. consumer welfare, firm profits, and foregone tariff revenue from its initiation th...

Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in China's Political Promotion Incentives

By Matthew E. Kahn, Pei Li, and Daxuan Zhao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

At political boundaries, local leaders have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local po...