The Economics of Fair Trade

By Raluca Dragusanu, Daniele Giovannucci, and Nathan Nunn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

Fair Trade is a labeling initiative aimed at improving the lives of the poor in developing countries by offering better terms to producers and helping them to organize. Although Fair Trade-certified products still comprise a small share of the market&mdas...

What Does Health Reform Mean for the Health Care Industry? Evidence from the Massachusetts Special Senate Election

By Mohamad M. Al-Ississ and Nolan H. Miller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We exploit the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown to the US Senate to evaluate the market's assessment of the impact of the recent US health reform legislation on the health care industry. We find that Brown's election was associated with abnorma...

Teaching Economics in the 21st Century

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of Economics]

By William E. Becker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

The desire to reverse a downward trend in the number of undergraduates majoring in economics is an impetus to advance the scholarship of teaching economics as we enter the 21st century. This article offers suggestions for changing the concepts taught and ...

Shocking Labor Supply: A Reassessment of the Role of World War II on Women's Labor Supply

By Claudia Goldin and Claudia Olivetti

American Economic Review, May 2013

The most prominent feature of the female labor force across the past hundred years is its enormous growth. But many believe that the increase was discontinuous. Our purpose is to identify the short- and long-run impacts of WWII on the labor supply of wome...

Shutting Down the Thermohaline Circulation

By David Anthoff, Francisco Estrada, and Richard S. J. Tol

American Economic Review, May 2016

Past climatic changes were caused by a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation. We use results from experiments with three climate models to show that the expected cooling due to a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation is less in magnitude than the ex...

An Empirical Assessment of the Comparative Advantage Gains from Trade: Evidence from Japan

By Daniel M. Bernhofen and John C. Brown

American Economic Review, March 2005

We provide an empirical assessment of the comparative advantage gains from trade argument. We use Japan's nineteenth-century opening up to world commerce as a natural experiment to answer the following counterfactual: "By how much would real income have h...

Frictional Wage Dispersion in Search Models: A Quantitative Assessment

By Andreas Hornstein, Per Krusell, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, December 2011

We propose a new measure of frictional wage dispersion: the mean-min wage ratio. For a large class of search models, we show that this measure is independent of the wage-offer distribution but depends on statistics of labor-market turnover and on preferen...

Has Economic Analysis Improved Regulatory Decisions?

[Symposium: Regulatory Economics]

By Robert W. Hahn and Paul C. Tetlock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

In response to the increasing impact of regulation, several governments have introduced economic analysis as a way of trying to improve regulatory policy. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of government-supported economic analysis of regulati...

The Value of Information in the Court: Get It Right, Keep It Tight

By Matias Iaryczower and Matthew Shum

American Economic Review, February 2012

We estimate an equilibrium model of decision making in the US Supreme Court that takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We measure the value of information in the court by the probability that a justice ...

On the (Ir)Relevance of Distribution and Labor Supply Distortion to Government Policy

By Louis Kaplow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Should the assessment of government policies, such as the provision of public goods and the control of externalities, deviate from first-best principles to account for distributive effects and the distortionary cost of labor income taxation? For example, ...

Present Bias: Lessons Learned and to Be Learned

By Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, May 2015

While present bias is an old idea, it only took hold in economics following David Laibson's (1994) dissertation. Over the past 20 years, research has led to a much better theoretical understanding of present bias, when and how to apply it, and which ancil...

Taking Stock: A Critical Assessment of Recent Research on Inventories

By Alan S. Blinder and Louis J. Maccini

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s. No one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories. Macroeconomists rout...

News-Driven Business Cycles: Insights and Challenges

By Paul Beaudry and Franck Portier

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in...

The Measurement of Student Ability in Modern Assessment Systems

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Brian Jacob and Jesse Rothstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Economists often use test scores to measure a student’s performance or an adult’s human capital. These scores reflect nontrivial decisions about how to measure and scale student achievement, with important implications for secondary analyses. For exam...

Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender

By Thomas Dohmen and Armin Falk

American Economic Review, April 2011

This paper studies the impact of incentives on worker self-selection in a controlled laboratory experiment. Subjects face the choice between a fixed and a variable payment scheme. Depending on the treatment, the variable payment is a piece rate, a tourna...

An Assessment of TARP Assistance to Financial Institutions

[Symposium: The Bailouts of 2007-2009]

By Charles W. Calomiris and Urooj Khan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

Six years after the passage of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, commonly known as TARP, it remains hard to measure the total social costs and benefits of the assistance to banks provided under TARP programs. TARP was not a single approach to assist...

Did We Lose the War on Poverty?

[Symposium: Measuring Poverty]

By Dale W. Jorgenson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

Official U.S. poverty statistics based on household income imply that the proportion of the U.S. population below the poverty level reached a minimum in 1973, giving rise to the widespread impression that the elimination of poverty is impossible. By contr...

Promoting Recycling: Private Values, Social Norms, and Economic Incentives

By W. Kip Viscusi, Joel Huber, and Jason Bell

American Economic Review, May 2011

Evidence from a nationally representative sample of households illuminates the determinants of recycling behavior for plastic water bottles. Private values of the environment are influential in promoting recycling, as are personal norms for pro-environmen...

The Impact of Ethnic Diversity in Bureaucracies: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service

By Imran Rasul and Daniel Rogger

American Economic Review, May 2015

We document the correlation between the workplace diversity in bureaucratic organizations and public service delivery. We do so in the context of Nigeria, where ethnicity is a salient form of self-identity. We thus expand the empirical management literatu...

Retrospectives: Hume on Money, Commerce, and the Science of Economics

By Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

David Hume (1711-1776) is arguably the most esteemed philosopher to have written in the English language. During his lifetime, however, Hume was as well if not better known for his contributions to political economy, particularly for the essays published ...