Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Labor Productivity Growth and Industrialization in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Margaret McMillan and Albert Zeufack

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Manufacturing has made an important contribution to raising living standards in many parts of the world. Concerns about premature deindustrialization have made some observers skeptical about the potential for manufacturing to play this role in Africa. B...

Agricultural Technology in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Tavneet Suri and Christopher Udry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

We discuss recent trends in agricultural productivity in Africa and highlight how technological progress in agriculture has stagnated on the continent. We briefly review the literature that tries to explain this stagnation through the lens of particular c...

Time Use and Gender in Africa in Times of Structural Transformation

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Taryn Dinkelman and L. Rachel Ngai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Many African countries are still in the early stages of structural transformation. Typically, as economies move through the structural transformation, activities once conducted within the household are outsourced to the market. This has particular impli...

Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Oriana Bandiera, Ahmed Elsayed, Andrea Smurra, and Céline Zipfel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Every year, millions of young adults join the labor market in Africa. This paper harmonizes surveys and censuses from 68 low- and middle-income countries to compare their job prospects to those of their counterparts in other low-income regions. We show th...

Political Distortions, State Capture, and Economic Development in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Nathan Canen and Leonard Wantchekon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural factors (e.g., pre-colonial and colonial institutions, or ethnic diversity) ma...

The Price of Nails since 1695: A Window into Economic Change

By Daniel E. Sichel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This paper focuses on the price of nails since 1695 and the proximate source of changes in those prices. Why nails? They are a basic manufactured product whose form and quality have changed relatively little over the last three centuries, yet the proces...

Comments

By Lawrence H. Goulder, Ian W.H. Parry, and Roberton C. Williams III

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession

By Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This paper documents a set of facts about the dramatic decline in birth rates in the United States between 2007 and 2020 and explores possible explanations. The overall reduction in the birth rate reflects declines across many groups of women, including...

Isaiah Andrews, 2021 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Anna Mikusheva and Jesse M. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Isaiah Andrews is an exceptionally warm and caring person, a remarkable teacher, collaborator, and mentor, an exemplary contributor to his department and profession, and a brilliant econometrician. In this article, we review Isaiah's contributions to econ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being

[Symposium: Happiness Economics]

By Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we d...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Gotta Have Money to Make Money? Bargaining Behavior and Financial Need of Microentrepreneurs

By Morgan Hardy, Gisella Kagy, and Lena Song

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Bargaining over real prices with microenterprise owners in Ghana, we show that sellers with less per capita household liquidity agree to lower sale prices. This relationship is robust across firms and within firms over time, even after controlling for a p...

Centralized Matching with Incomplete Information

By Marcelo Ariel Fernandez, Kirill Rudov, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We study the impacts of incomplete information on centralized one-to-one matching markets. We focus on the commonly used Deferred Acceptance mechanism (Gale and Shapley 1962). We show that many complete-information results are fragile to a small infusion ...

Risk Exposure and Acquisition of Macroeconomic Information

By Christopher Roth, Sonja Settele, and Johannes Wohlfart

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We conduct an experiment with a representative sample from the United States to study households' demand for macroeconomic information. Respondents who learn of a higher personal exposure to unemployment risk during recessions increase their demand for an...

Some Uses of Happiness Data in Economics

[Symposium: Happiness Economics]

By Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Happiness research is based on the idea that it is fruitful to study empirical measures of individual welfare. The most common is the answer to a simple well-being question such as "Are you Happy?" Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been asked this...

Can Technology Solve the Principal-Agent Problem? Evidence from China's War on Air Pollution

By Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Ruixue Jia, and Tong Liu

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We examine the introduction of automatic air pollution monitoring to counter suspected tampering at the local level, a central feature of China's "war on pollution." Exploiting 654 regression discontinuity designs based on city-level variation in the day ...