Asymmetric Attention

By Alexandre N. Kohlhas and Ansgar Walther

American Economic Review, September 2021

We document that the expectations of households, firms, and professional forecasters in standard surveys simultaneously extrapolate from recent events and underreact to new information. Existing models of expectation formation, whether behavioral or ratio...

The Effects of Parental and Sibling Incarceration: Evidence from Ohio

By Samuel Norris, Matthew Pecenco, and Jeffrey Weaver

American Economic Review, September 2021

Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experim...

From Weber to Kafka: Political Instability and the Overproduction of Laws

By Gabriele Gratton, Luigi Guiso, Claudio Michelacci, and Massimo Morelli

American Economic Review, September 2021

With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency, this mechanism can generate a st...

Saving Social Security

[Symposium: Social Security Reform]

By Peter A. Diamond and Peter R. Orszag

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Social Security is one of America's most successful government programs. It has helped millions of Americans avoid poverty in old age. To be sure, the program faces a long-term deficit and is in need of updating. But Social Security's long-term financial ...

Justified Communication Equilibrium

By Daniel Clark and Drew Fudenberg

American Economic Review, September 2021

Justified communication equilibrium (JCE) is an equilibrium refinement for signaling games with cheap-talk communication. A strategy profile must be a JCE to be a stable outcome of nonequilibrium learning when receivers are initially trusting and senders ...

The Challenges of Universal Health Insurance in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia's National Health Insurance

By Abhijit Banerjee, Amy Finkelstein, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Arianna Ornaghi, and Sudarno Sumarto

American Economic Review, September 2021

To investigate barriers to universal health insurance in developing countries, we designed a randomized experiment involving about 6,000 households in Indonesia who are subject to a government health insurance program with a weakly enforced mandate. Time-...

Media, Pulpit, and Populist Persuasion: Evidence from Father Coughlin

By Tianyi Wang

American Economic Review, September 2021

I study the political impact of the first populist radio personality in American history. Father Charles Coughlin blended populist demagoguery, anti-Semitism, and fascist sympathies to create a hugely popular radio program that attracted 30 million weekly...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

Structural Reform of Social Security

[Symposium: Social Security Reform]

By Martin Feldstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Governments around the world have enacted or are currently considering fundamental structural reforms of their Social Security pension programs. The key feature in these reforms is a shift from a pure pay-as-you-go tax-financed system, in which taxes on c...

What Drives House Price Cycles? International Experience and Policy Issues

By John V. Duca, John Muellbauer, and Anthony Murphy

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

The role of real estate during the global financial and economic crisis has prompted efforts to better incorporate housing and financial channels into macro models, improve housing models, develop macroprudential tools, and reform the financial system. ...

Automated Linking of Historical Data

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Katherine Eriksson, James Feigenbaum, and Santiago Pérez

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate differen...

Household Finance

By Francisco Gomes, Michael Haliassos, and Tarun Ramadorai

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

Household financial decisions are complex, interdependent, and heterogeneous, and central to the functioning of the financial system. We present an overview of the rapidly expanding literature on household finance (with some important exceptions) and su...

A Review of Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti's Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids

By Lena Edlund

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

As Generation X's (born in the 1960s and 1970s) child bearing years draw to a close, its parenting practices are due for assessment, the topic of the book under review. The book organizes its discussion around Diana Baumrind's three parenting styles: auth...

Review of Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences

By Gerard Roland

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

Archeologists are actively working to quantitatively measure income and wealth inequality in ancient history based on available data, some of them being quite sophisticated. Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith's Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: Th...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

Intellectual Property: The Law and Economics Approach

[Symposium: Intellectual Property Rights]

By Richard A. Posner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

With the rise of the law and economics movement, the focus of economic analysis of intellectual property has begun to shift to more concrete and manageable issues concerning the structure and texture of the complicated pattern of common law and statutory ...

Probabilistic Patents

[Symposium: Intellectual Property Rights]

By Mark A. Lemley and Carl Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Economists often assume that a patent gives its owner a well-defined legal right to exclude others from practicing the invention described in the patent. In practice, however, the rights afforded to patent holders are highly uncertain. Under patent law, a...

The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond

[Symposium: Intellectual Property Rights]

By Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

This paper reviews our understanding of the growing open source movement. We highlight how many aspects of open source software appear initially puzzling to an economist. As we have acknowledged, our ability to answer confidently many of the issues raised...