Review of Skidelsky's John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain

By J. Bradford Delong

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

Skidelsky's three-volume biography of Keynes, of which this is the third, gives us Keynes, entire. The meat of the biography lies in the well-constructed narrative and in the magnificent portraits of Keynes and his age. Robert Skidelsky has given us a sup...

Minimum-Wage Increases and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle

By Ekaterina Jardim, Mark C. Long, Robert Plotnick, Emma van Inwegen, Jacob Vigdor, and Hilary Wething

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

Seattle raised its minimum wage to as much as $11 in 2015 and as much as $13 in 2016. We use Washington State administrative data to conduct two complementary analyses of its impact. Relative to outlying regions of the state identified by the synthetic ...

The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund

By Damon Jones and Ioana Marinescu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

Since 1982, all Alaskan residents have received a yearly cash dividend from the Alaska Permanent Fund. Using the Current Population Survey and a synthetic control method, this paper shows that the dividend had no effect on employment and increased part-ti...

The Electric Gini: Income Redistribution through Energy Prices

By Arik Levinson and Emilson Silva

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

In theory, regulators concerned about inequality will deviate from efficient two-part tariffs, charging lower-than-efficient fixed monthly fees and higher-than-efficient per-kilowatt-hour prices. To quantify that relationship, we develop a measure of the ...

When Does Product Liability Risk Chill Innovation? Evidence from Medical Implants

By Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

Liability laws designed to compensate for harms caused by defective products may also affect innovation. We examine this issue by exploiting a major quasi-exogenous increase in liability risk faced by US suppliers of polymers used to manufacture medical i...

Mentoring and the Dynamics of Affirmative Action

By Michèle Müller-Itten and Aniko Öry

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

We analyze the long-term workforce composition when the quality of mentoring available to majority and minority juniors depends on their representation in the workforce. A workforce with at least 50 percent majority workers invariably converges to one whe...

The Effect of Charter School Openings on Traditional Public Schools in Massachusetts and North Carolina

By Kirsten Slungaard Mumma

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

The rapid expansion of charter schools has fueled concerns about their impact on traditional public schools. I estimate the effect of charter openings on traditional public schools in Massachusetts and North Carolina by comparing schools near actual chart...

How Do Beliefs about the Gender Wage Gap Affect the Demand for Public Policy?

By Sonja Settele

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

I conduct a survey experiment to study the relationship between people's beliefs about the size of the gender wage gap and their demand for policies aimed at mitigating it. Beliefs causally affect support for equal pay legislation and affirmative action p...

The Valuation of Local School Quality under School Choice

By Angela Zheng

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

School choice programs break the link between residential location and school attendance, and should weaken the capitalization of school quality into house prices. For the first time, I quantify the effect of one such program—charter school expansionsâ€...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

A Social Insurance Perspective on Pandemic Fiscal Policy: Implications for Unemployment Insurance and Hazard Pay

[Symposium: Macro Policy in the Pandemic]

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

This paper considers fiscal policy during the pandemic through the lens of optimal social insurance. We develop a simple framework to analyze how government taxes and transfers could mimic the insurance that people would like to have had against pandemi...

Should We Insure Workers or Jobs during Recessions?

[Symposium: Macro Policy in the Pandemic]

By Giulia Giupponi, Camille Landais, and Alice Lapeyre

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

What is the most efficient way to respond to recessions in the labor market? To this question, policymakers on the two sides of the pond gave diametrically opposed answers during the COVID-19 crisis. In the United States, the focus was on insuring worke...

The $800 Billion Paycheck Protection Program: Where Did the Money Go and Why Did It Go There?

[Symposium: Macro Policy in the Pandemic]

By David Autor, David Cho, Leland D. Crane, Mita Goldar, Byron Lutz, Joshua Montes, William B. Peterman, David Ratner, Daniel Villar, and Ahu Yildirmaz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) provided small businesses with roughly $800 billion dollars in uncollateralized, low-interest loans during the pandemic, almost all of which will be forgiven. With 94 percent of small businesses ultimately receiving...

American Enslavement and the Recovery of Black Economic History

[Symposium: Economics of Slavery]

By Trevon D. Logan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

This paper reconsiders the evidence needed to answer pressing questions of economic history and racial inequality, the Third Phase of research on American Enslavement and its Aftermath. First, I briefly summarize how economists have sought to understand s...

The Cumulative Costs of Racism and the Bill for Black Reparations

[Symposium: Economics of Slavery]

By William Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen, and Marvin Slaughter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

Two major procedures for establishing the monetary value of a plan for reparations for Black American descendants of US slavery are considered in this paper: 1) Enumeration of atrocities and assignment of a dollar value to each as a prelude to adding up...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy

[Symposium: Economics of Slavery]

By Gavin Wright

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

The essay considers the claim that slavery played a leading role in the acceleration of US economic growth in the nineteenth century. Although popular among pro-slavery apologists, the proposition fails under rigorous historical scrutiny. The slave Sout...

Children and the US Social Safety Net: Balancing Disincentives for Adults and Benefits for Children

[Symposium: Childhood Interventions]

By Anna Aizer, Hilary Hoynes, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

Economic research on the safety net has evolved over time, moving away from a focus on the negative incentive effects of means-tested assistance on employment, earnings, marriage, and fertility to include the potential positive benefits of such programs...

Universal Early-Life Health Policies in the Nordic Countries

[Symposium: Childhood Interventions]

By Miriam Wüst

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

Given mounting evidence on the negative impact of early-life shocks for the wellbeing of people over the life course, a growing economics literature studies whether early-life policies have symmetric positive effects. This paper zooms in on research on ...