Inside the Box: Safety, Health, and Isolation in Prison

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Bruce Western

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

A large social science research literature examines the effects of prisons on crime and socioeconomic inequality, but the penal institution itself is often a black box overlooked in the analysis of its effects. This paper examines prisons and their role i...

Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Benjamin K. Couillard, Christopher L. Foote, Kavish Gandhi, Ellen Meara, and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The twenty-first century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply beca...

The Causal Effects of Place on Health and Longevity

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Tatyana Deryugina and David Molitor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Life expectancy varies substantially across local regions within a country, raising conjectures that place of residence affects health. However, population sorting and other confounders make it difficult to disentangle the effects of place on health from ...

When Innovation Goes Wrong: Technological Regress and the Opioid Epidemic

By David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The fourfold increase in opioid deaths between 2000 and 2017 rivals even the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis for America. Why did it happen? Measures of demand for pain relief—physical pain and despair—are high and in many cases rising, but their...

Neighborhoods Matter: Assessing the Evidence for Place Effects

By Eric Chyn and Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

How does one's place of residence affect individual behavior and long-run outcomes? Understanding neighborhood and place effects has been a leading question for social scientists during the past half-century. Recent empirical studies using experimental an...

Affirmative Action and Its Mythology

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Glenn C. Loury

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

For more than three decades, critics and supporters of affirmative action have fought for the moral high ground through ballot initiatives and lawsuits, in state legislatures, and in varied courts of public opinion. The goal of this paper is to show the c...

College Majors, Occupations, and the Gender Wage Gap

By Carolyn M. Sloane, Erik G. Hurst, and Dan A. Black

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The paper assesses gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college-educated and highlights how those differences have evolved over time. Women choose majors with lower potential earnings (based on male wages associated with those m...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Dividend Taxation and Corporate Governance

By Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

In 2003, the United States enacted a tax reform that reduced, but did not eliminate, individual dividend income taxes. Cutting the dividend tax deprives corporate insiders of a justification for retaining earnings to build unprofitable corporate empires. ...

Steven D. Levitt: 2003 John Bates Clark Medalist

By James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

Steve's Clark Medal citation mentions his path-breaking contributions to the economics of crime and to the political economy of campaign finance. This paper describes Steve's research in each of these areas, as well as his contributions on a range of othe...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2021

Product Innovation, Product Diversification, and Firm Growth: Evidence from Japan's Early Industrialization

By Serguey Braguinsky, Atsushi Ohyama, Tetsuji Okazaki, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, December 2021

We explore how firms grow by adding products. We leverage detailed data from Japan's cotton spinning industry at the turn of the last century to do so. This setting allows us to fully characterize the type of differentiation (vertical or horizontal) of ...

Tax Administration versus Tax Rates: Evidence from Corporate Taxation in Indonesia

By M. Chatib Basri, Mayara Felix, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review, December 2021

We compare two approaches to increasing tax revenue: tax administration and tax rates. We show that when Indonesia moved top regional firms into "medium taxpayer offices," with high staff-to-taxpayer ratios, tax revenue more than doubled. Examining nonlin...

Sectoral Media Focus and Aggregate Fluctuations

By Ryan Chahrour, Kristoffer Nimark, and Stefan Pitschner

American Economic Review, December 2021

We formalize the editorial role of news media in a multisector economy and show that media can be an independent source of business cycle fluctuations, even when they report accurate information. Public reporting about a subset of sectoral developments th...

Team-Specific Human Capital and Team Performance: Evidence from Doctors

By Yiqun Chen

American Economic Review, December 2021

This paper studies whether team members' past collaboration creates team-specific human capital and influences current team performance. Using administrative Medicare claims for two heart procedures, I find that shared work experience between the doctor w...

History Lessons: The End of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States Since 1850

By Joseph P. Ferrie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

New longitudinal data on individuals linked across nineteenth century U.S. censuses document the geographic and occupational mobility of more than 75,000 Americans from the 1850s to the 1920s. Together with longitudinal data for more recent years, these d...

Prep School for Poor Kids: The Long-Run Impacts of Head Start on Human Capital and Economic Self-Sufficiency

By Martha J. Bailey, Shuqiao Sun, and Brenden Timpe

American Economic Review, December 2021

This paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted administrative data. Using the county roll-out of Head Start between 1965 and 1980 and age-eligibility cutoffs for school entry, we find that Head Start generated large ...

M Equilibrium: A Theory of Beliefs and Choices in Games

By Jacob K. Goeree and Philippos Louis

American Economic Review, December 2021

We introduce a set-valued solution concept, M equilibrium, to capture empirical regularities from over half a century of game theory experiments. We show M equilibrium serves as a meta theory for various models that hitherto were considered unrelated. M e...

Delegation in Veto Bargaining

By Navin Kartik, Andreas Kleiner, and Richard Van Weelden

American Economic Review, December 2021

A proposer requires a veto player's approval to change a status quo. Proposer is uncertain about Vetoer's preferences. We show that Vetoer is typically given a non-singleton menu, or delegation set, of options to pick from. The optimal set balances the ex...

Synthetic Difference-in-Differences

By Dmitry Arkhangelsky, Susan Athey, David A. Hirshberg, Guido W. Imbens, and Stefan Wager

American Economic Review, December 2021

We present a new estimator for causal effects with panel data that builds on insights behind the widely used difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods. Relative to these methods we find, both theoretically and empirically, that this "synthet...