Learning on the Job and the Cost of Business Cycles

By Karl Walentin and Andreas Westermark

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2022

We show that business cycles reduce welfare through a decrease in the average level of employment in a labor market search model with learning on the job and skill loss during unemployment. Empirically, unemployment and the job-finding rate are negatively...

Neo-Fisherian Policies and Liquidity Traps

By Florin O. Bilbiie

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2022

Liquidity traps can be either fundamental or confidence-driven. In a simple, unified New Keynesian framework, I provide the analytical condition for the latter's prevalence: enough shock persistence and endogenous intertemporal amplification of future ("n...

Optimal Public Debt with Life Cycle Motives

By William B. Peterman and Erick Sager

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2022

This paper determines optimal public debt in a life cycle model with incomplete markets that matches the empirically observed variation in consumption, labor, and savings. We find that public savings—not public debt—equal to 168 percent of output is o...

Which Is the Fairest One of All? A Positive Analysis of Justice Theories

By James Konow

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2003

This paper evaluates numerous positive and normative theories of justice in positive terms, i.e., in terms of how accurately they describe the impartial fairness preferences of real people. In addition, the paper proposes and defends an integrated justice...

Family Heterogeneity, Human Capital Investment, and College Attainment

By Adam Blandin and Christopher Herrington

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2022

From 1995 to 2015 the aggregate US college completion rate increased almost 50 percent, but completion trends differed markedly by family background. We consider whether changing college preparedness contributed to growth in aggregate completion and diffe...

Population Aging and Structural Transformation

By Javier Cravino, Andrei Levchenko, and Marco Rojas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2022

We quantify the role of population aging in the structural transformation process. Household-level data from the United States show that the fraction of expenditures devoted to services increases with household age. We use a shift-share decomposition and ...

Asymmetric Effects of Monetary Policy in Regional Housing Markets

By Knut Are Aastveit and André K. Anundsen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2022

The responsiveness of house prices to monetary policy shocks depends on the nature of the shock—expansionary versus contractionary—and on local housing supply elasticities. These findings are established using a panel of 263 US metropolitan areas. Exp...

Sraffa, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci

By Amartya Sen

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2003

Two distinct but interrelated issues are investigated here. The first concerns Sraffa's critical role in contemporary philosophy through his pivotal influence on Wittgenstein. The intellectual origins of this profound influence can be traced to the philos...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, November 2022

The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population

By Charles I. Jones

American Economic Review, November 2022

In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fe...

Meltzer's History of the Federal Reserve

By David Laidler

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2003

This review argues that Allan Meltzer's account of the Federal Reserve between 1913 and 1951 complements Friedman and Schwartz's in their Monetary History. Meltzer emphasizes policy making within the system, rather than the evolution of the money supply a...

Persistent Polarizing Effects of Persuasion: Experimental Evidence from Turkey

By Ceren Baysan

American Economic Review, November 2022

I evaluate randomly varied neighborhood exposure to information campaigns regarding either executive performance, or increases in executive power, prior to a Turkish referendum on weakening checks and balances on the executive. The campaigns increased vot...

Job Search and Hiring with Limited Information about Workseekers' Skills

By Eliana Carranza, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Neil Rankin

American Economic Review, November 2022

We assess South African workseekers' skills and disseminate the assessment results to explore how limited information affects firm and workseeker behavior. Giving workseekers assessment results that they can credibly share with firms increases workseekers...

Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice

By Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Annamaria Lusardi

American Economic Review, November 2022

We examine methods for evaluating interventions designed to improve decision-making quality when people misunderstand the consequences of their choices. In an experiment involving financial education, conventional outcome metrics (financial literacy and d...

Vulnerability and Clientelism

By Gustavo J. Bobonis, Paul J. Gertler, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Simeon Nichter

American Economic Review, November 2022

This study argues that economic vulnerability causes citizens to participate in clientelism, a phenomenon with various pernicious consequences. To examine how reduced vulnerability affects citizens' participation in clientelism, we employ two exogenous sh...

Social Media and Mental Health

By Luca Braghieri, Ro'ee Levy, and Alexey Makarin

American Economic Review, November 2022

We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the year...

The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

By Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra

American Economic Review, November 2022

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals in a field experiment with ...

Human Capital Depreciation and Returns to Experience

By Michael Dinerstein, Rigissa Megalokonomou, and Constantine Yannelis

American Economic Review, November 2022

Human capital can depreciate if skills are unused. But estimating human capital depreciation is challenging, as worker skills are difficult to measure and less productive workers are more likely to spend time in nonemployment. We overcome these challenges...

Immigration and Spatial Equilibrium: The Role of Expenditures in the Country of Origin

By Christoph Albert and Joan Monras

American Economic Review, November 2022

We document that international migrants concentrate more in expensive cities—the more so, the lower the prices in their origin countries are—and consume less locally than comparable natives. We rationalize this empirical evidence by introducing a quan...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2003