Retrospectives: Whatever Happened to the Cambridge Capital Theory Controversies?

By Avi J. Cohen and G. C. Harcourt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

We argue that the Cambridge capital theory controversies of the 1950s to 1970s were the latest in a series of still-unresolved controversies over three deep issues: explaining and justifying the return to capital; Joan Robinson's complaint that, due to pa...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

The Fall of Enron

[Symposium: Enron and Conflict of Interest]

By Paul M. Healy and Krishna G. Palepu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The financial reporting and disclosure problems at Enron, as well as the high market valuations for its stock raise troubling questions about the functioning of capital market intermediaries, regulators and governance experts whose are supposed to ensure ...

Corporate Earnings: Facts and Fiction

[Symposium: Enron and Conflict of Interest]

By Baruch Lev

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Manipulated earnings played a central role in the slew of corporate scandals which surfaced during the last three years. This article focuses on the vulnerability of earnings to manipulation by managers: it surveys the empirical record of manipulation, th...

Contracts Between Art and Commerce

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Richard E. Caves

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Contract structures used in the arts and entertainment industries are central to understanding their economic organization. The structures spring from common bedrock traits of these industries--pervasive product differentiation, all costs sunk, consumers'...

Some Economics of Ticket Resale

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Pascal Courty

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

A large number of brokers and scalpers resell a significant fraction of event tickets at substantial markups and they manage to do so despite the fact that promoters and ticketing agencies do not support resell for profits and often attempt to block secon...

Awards, Success and Aesthetic Quality in the Arts

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Victor Ginsburgh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The role of experts is dramatically increasing in our societies, where sorting information about quality is becoming more and more difficult. This paper looks at expertise in the arts (movies, novels and musical interpretation) and shows that expert opini...

Perspectives from the President's Commission on Social Security Reform

By John F. Cogan and Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Recently we were asked to serve on the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security (CSSS) along with 14 other members drawn equally from both major political parties. The Commission's charge was to provide recommendations to modernize the Social ...

Policy Watch: The Expanding Reach of the Individual Alternative Minimum Tax

By Leonard E. Burman, William G. Gale, and Jeffrey Rohaly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) was designed in 1970 to apply reduce aggressive tax sheltering, but under current law will grow to cover tens of millions of households in the next decade. The growth occurs because the AMT is not indexed for i...

History Lessons: Sanctions - Neither War nor Peace

By Lance Davis and Stanley Engerman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

This paper surveys the increasing international use of sanctions over the past century. Sanctions are a form of action taken by one state or by collective action to influence another state to change its behavior, as a substitute for welfare. They generall...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The Economics and Law of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

By Kaushik Basu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Suppose a firm has a widespread reputation for sexually harassing its employees. When a person signs up to work for such a firm, it would appear that both the firm and the worker are better off by virtue of the "exchange". Is there a case then for governm...

Halving Global Poverty

[Symposium: Global Poverty Reduction]

By Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

The Millennium Development Goals--global targets that the world's leaders set at the Millennium Summit in September 2000--are an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty. As a central plank, these goals include halving the proportion of people living below a...

Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth?

[Symposium: Global Poverty Reduction]

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

The widely publicized finding that "aid promotes growth in a good policy environment" is not robust to the inclusion of new data or alternative definitions of "aid," "policy" or "growth." The idea that "aid buys growth" is on shaky ground theoretically an...

In Honor of Matthew Rabin: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Colin Camerer and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Although there is some evidence that Matthew Rabin existed before 1990, we had the pleasure of discovering him for ourselves when, in the early 1990s, he sent each of us a copy of his manuscript "Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics" [2]....

Retrospectives: Who Invented Instrumental Variable Regression?

By James H. Stock and Francesco Trebbi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

This feature addresses the history of economic words and ideas. The hope is to deepen the workaday dialogue of economists, while perhaps also casting new light on ongoing questions.