Theory Ahead of Language in the Economics of Unemployment

[Symposium: The Natural Rate of Unemployment]

By Richard Rogerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

This paper discusses, from the perspective of modern theories of unemployment, several unemployment concepts that have been used over the years. It argues that many of these concepts are of limited value and are dominated by a few simple concepts that are...

Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: Public Policy, Values, and Consciousness

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

Economists should pay more attention to value formation in economic analysis. First, preferences are not stable in any operationally meaningful sense. Any estimated micro behavior that does not take account of the consequences of the behavior on underlyin...

Integrated Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data for the United States

By John J. Abowd, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane

American Economic Review, May 2004

Regulation and the High Cost of Housing in California

By John M. Quigley and Steven Raphael

American Economic Review, May 2005

Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets

By William J. Collins

American Economic Review, March 2001

The Economy of the Early Roman Empire

By Peter Temin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Many inhabitants of ancient Rome lived well. Tourists marvel at the temples, baths, roads and aqueducts that they built. Economists also want to understand the existence of a flourishing and apparently prosperous economy two millennia ago. Market institut...

Information, International Substitutability, and Globalization

By James E. Rauch and Vitor Trindade

American Economic Review, June 2003

Improved information allows home firms to rule out more potential foreign trade partners in advance of attempting to form a match. The increased responsiveness to country wage or goods price differentials resulting from this better first cut causes the ge...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Self-Enforcing Voting in International Organizations

By Giovanni Maggi and Massimo Morelli

American Economic Review, September 2006

Some international organizations are governed by unanimity rule, others by (simple or qualified) majority rules. Standard voting models, which assume that the decisions made by voting are perfectly enforceable, have a hard time explaining the observed ...

Integrated Insurance Design in the Presence of Multiple Medical Technologies

By Dana Goldman and Tomas J. Philipson

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Online Advertising Industry: Economics, Evolution, and Privacy

[Symposium: Internet Economics]

By David S. Evans

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009

Online advertising accounts for almost 9 percent of all advertising in the United States. This share is expected to increase as more media is consumed over the Internet and as more advertisers shift spending to online technologies. The expansion of Intern...

Was Development Assistance a Mistake?

By William Easterly

American Economic Review, May 2007

From Efficient Markets Theory to Behavioral Finance

[Symposium: Financial Market Efficiency]

By Robert J. Shiller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

The efficient markets theory reached the height of its dominance in academic circles around the 1970s. Faith in this theory was eroded by a succession of discoveries of anomalies, many in the 1980s, and of evidence of excess volatility of returns. Finance...

Valuing Consumer Products by the Time Spent Using Them: An Application to the Internet

By Austan Goolsbee and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, May 2006

Managing Growth to Achieve Efficient Coordination in Large Groups

By Roberto A. Weber

American Economic Review, March 2006

Previous experiments using the minimum-effort coordination game reveal a striking regularity—large groups never coordinate efficiently. Given the frequency with which large real-world groups, such as firms, face similarly difficult coordination problems...

Can a Representative-Agent Model Represent a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy

By Sungbae An, Yongsung Chang, and Sun-Bin Kim

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors. In order to reconcile theory with da...

The Theory of the Firm as Governance Structure: From Choice to Contract

By Oliver E. Williamson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

The propositions that organization matters and that it is susceptible to analysis were long greeted by skepticism by economists. One reason why this message took a long time to register is that it is much easier to say that organization matters than it is...

Gender Differences in Pay

[Symposium: Women and the Labor Market]

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

We consider the gender pay gap in the United States. Both gender-specific factors, including gender differences in qualifications and discrimination, and overall wage structure, the rewards for skills and employment in particular sectors, importantly infl...

Trade Liberalization and Poverty: The Evidence So Far

By L. Alan Winters, Neil McCulloch, and Andrew McKay

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2004

This paper assesses the current state of evidence on the impact of trade policy reform on poverty in developing countries. There is little empirical evidence addressing this question directly, but a lot of related evidence on specific aspects. We summariz...

Microfinance Games

By Xavier Giné, Pamela Jakiela, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Morduch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Microfinance banks use group-based lending contracts to strengthen borrowers' incentives for diligence, but the contracts are vulnerable to free-riding and collusion. We systematically unpack microfinance mechanisms through ten experimental games played ...