The U.S. Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future

By J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

For more than a century, diversified long-horizon investments in America's stock market have consistently received much higher returns than investors in bonds: a return gap averaging 6 percent per year. An enormous amount of creative and ingenious work by...

The Global Welfare Impact of China: Trade Integration and Technological Change

By Julian di Giovanni, Andrei A. Levchenko, and Jing Zhang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a multi-country quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model. We simulate two alternative growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productiv...

Economic Effects of an Ocean Acidification Catastrophe

By Stephen G. Colt and Gunnar P. Knapp

American Economic Review, May 2016

We assess the potential magnitude of the economic effects of an ocean acidification (OA) catastrophe by focusing on marine ecosystem services most likely to be affected. It is scientifically plausible that by 2200 OA could cause a complete collapse of mar...

Connecting Student Loans to Labor Market Outcomes: Policy Lessons from Chile

By Harald Beyer, Justine Hastings, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman

American Economic Review, May 2015

Rising student loan default rates and protests over debt suggest that many students make college enrollment and financing choices they regret. Policymakers have considered tying the availability of federally subsidized loans at degree programs to financia...

Toward a Cost-of-Living Index: Progress and Prospects

[Symposium: Consumer Price Index]

By Katharine G. Abraham

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Job Displacement

By Lori G. Kletzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

The past decade and a half has seen tremendous research growth in the area of job displacement. This paper discusses the state of knowledge on the issues and questions of job loss. The 1984-96 Displaced Worker Surveys are used to describe how the characte...

Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By James Banks, Richard Blundell, and Carl Emmerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The UK has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits that has made it a major case study for other countries thinking of reform. The introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995 coincided with a strong decline in disability benefit...

Women in Economics: Moving Up or Falling Off the Academic Career Ladder?

By Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

The percentage of economics doctorates awarded to women has increased over the past twenty years. This article considers whether women Ph.D. economists have increased their representation in academia, particularly at higher tenured ranks. Our study draws ...

Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration

By Thomas Sampson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on its membership in the European Union. Although most of Britain's establishment backed remaining in the European Union, 52 percent of voters disagreed and handed a surprise victory to the "leave" ...

Playing the Boys Game: Golf Buddies and Board Diversity

By Sumit Agarwal, Wenlan Qian, David M. Reeb, and Tien Foo Sing

American Economic Review, May 2016

We study the participation of women in golf, a predominately male social activity, and its influence on their likelihood of serving on a board of directors. Exploiting a novel dataset of all golfers in Singapore, we find that woman golfers enjoy a 54% hig...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

Social Interactions in High School: Lessons from an Earthquake

By Piero Cipollone and Alfonso Rosolia

American Economic Review, June 2007

After an earthquake hit Southern Italy in 1980, young men from certain towns were exempted from compulsory military service. We show that the exemption raised high-school-graduation rates of boys by more than 2 percentage points. We do this by comparing h...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2015

A Model of Forum Shopping

By Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, September 2006

Owners of intellectual property or mere sponsors of an idea (e.g., authors, security issuers, sponsors of standards) resort to more or less independent certifiers to persuade potential users (buyers or adopters) of the worth of their property or idea. W...

Dynamics of Demand for Index Insurance: Evidence from a Long-Run Field Experiment

By Shawn Cole, Daniel Stein, and Jeremy Tobacman

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper estimates how experimentally-manipulated experiences with a novel financial product, rainfall index insurance, affect subsequent insurance demand. Using a seven-year panel, we develop three main findings. First, recent experience matters for de...

Pharmaceuticals in U.S. Health Care: Determinants of Quantity and Price

[Symposium: Pharmaceuticals]

By Ernst R. Berndt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has again become the focus of considerable controversy. In understanding the economics underlying this industry, distinctions between short, medium and long-run costs are critical, as is that between economic and accountin...

Negative Marginal Tax Rates and Heterogeneity

By Philippe Choné and Guy Laroque

American Economic Review, December 2010

Heterogeneity is an important determinant of the shape of optimal tax schemes. This is shown here in a model à la Mirrlees. The agents differ in their productivities and opportunity costs of work, but their labor supplies depend only on a given uni...

Conducting Monetary Policy at Very Low Short-Term Interest Rates

By Ben S. Bernanke and Vincent R. Reinhart

American Economic Review, May 2004

Bend Them but Don't Break Them: Passionate Workers, Skeptical Managers, and Decision Making in Organizations

By Omar A. Nayeem

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2017

This paper explores the useful but delicate role of managerial skepticism in hierarchical knowledge-based organizations. In these settings, the decision-maker principal seeks advice from managers, who instruct expert frontline workers to acquire informati...

The Central Role of Entrepreneurs in Transition Economies

By John McMillan and Christopher Woodruff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

The authors summarize entrepreneurial patterns in the transition economies, particularly Russia, China, Poland and Vietnam. Markets developed spontaneously in every transition country, but they were built at varying speeds. Some governments impeded the en...