The Public Health Effects of Legalizing Marijuana

By D. Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Thirty-six states have legalized medical marijuana and 18 states have legalized the use of marijuana for recreational purposes. In this paper, we review the literature on the public health consequences of legalizing marijuana, focusing on studies that h...

Financial Crises: Review of Eichengreen and Tirole

By Stanley Fischer

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2004

The Economics of Internal Migration: Advances and Policy Questions

By Ning Jia, Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith, and Abigail Wozniak

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

We review developments in research on within-country migration, focusing on internal migration in the United States. We begin by describing approaches to modeling individuals' migration decisions and equilibrium outcomes across local areas. Next, we summa...

Hysteresis and Business Cycles

By Valerie Cerra, Antonio Fatás, and Sweta C. Saxena

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as "hysteresis," argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this ...

Rational Inattention: A Review

By Bartosz Maćkowiak, Filip Matějka, and Mirko Wiederholt

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

We review the recent literature on rational inattention, identify the main theoretical mechanisms, and explain how it helps us understand a variety of phenomena across fields of economics. The theory of rational inattention assumes that agents cannot pr...

How Unique Is VC's American History?

By Arthur Korteweg and Berk Sensoy

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

VC: An American History, by Tom Nicholas, offers a compelling chronicle of the development of professional venture capital (VC) in the United States—from VC-like forebearers as diverse as eighteenth-century cotton manufacturing and nineteenth...

Book Review

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Review of The New Financial Order by Shiller

By Stephen A. Ross

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2004

JEL Classification System for Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

The Unity of Auction Theory: Milgrom's Masterclass

By Eric Maskin

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2004

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Infrastructure Costs

By Leah Brooks and Zachary Liscow

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Despite infrastructure's importance to the US economy, evidence on its cost trajectory over time is sparse. We document real spending per new mile over the history of the Interstate Highway System. We find that spending per mile increased more than threef...

Discriminatory Lending: Evidence from Bankers in the Lab

By J. Michelle Brock and Ralph De Haas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment with 334 Turkish loan officers to document gender discrimination in small business lending and unpack mechanisms. Officers review multiple real-life loan applications in which we randomize applicant gender. While...

Income Segregation and the Rise of the Knowledge Economy

By Enrico Berkes and Ruben Gaetani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

We analyze the effect of an increase in knowledge-intensive activities on spatial inequality in US cities. We leverage a predetermined network of patent citations to instrument for local innovation trends. Between 1990 and 2010, a one-standard-deviation i...

Do Thank-You Calls Increase Charitable Giving? Expert Forecasts and Field Experimental Evidence

By Anya Samek and Chuck Longfield

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Calling to thank donors is considered a key fundraising strategy in the charitable giving industry. Yet the effectiveness of thank-you calls remains untested. We conduct field experiments with public television stations and a national nonprofit in which 5...

DETER-ing Deforestation in the Amazon: Environmental Monitoring and Law Enforcement

By Juliano Assunção, Clarissa Gandour, and Romero Rocha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

We study Brazil's recent use of satellite technology to overcome law enforcement shortcomings resulting from weak institutional environments. DETER is a system that processes satellite imagery and issues near-real-time deforestation alerts to target envir...

Pay Transparency and the Gender Gap

By Michael Baker, Yosh Halberstam, Kory Kroft, Alexandre Mas, and Derek Messacar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces ...

Natural Resource Booms, Human Capital, and Earnings: Evidence from Linked Education and Employment Records

By Alina Kovalenko

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Using administrative panel data on the universe of Texas public school students, I analyze how shocks to local economic conditions affect education and employment decisions. I find that high school students at the bottom of the academic ability distributi...

Emigration and Entrepreneurial Drain

By Massimo Anelli, Gaetano Basso, Giuseppe Ippedico, and Giovanni Peri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Emigration of young, highly educated individuals may deprive origin countries of entrepreneurs. We identify exogenous variation in emigration from Italy by interacting past diaspora networks and current economic pull factors in destination countries. We f...