Valuing Alternative Work Arrangements

By Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, December 2017

We employ a discrete choice experiment in the employment process for a national call center to estimate the willingness to pay distribution for alternative work arrangements relative to traditional office positions. Most workers are not willing to pay for...

Announcements of Support and Public Good Provision

By Judd B. Kessler

American Economic Review, December 2017

Providing information about contributions to public goods is known to generate further contributions. However, it is often impossible to provide verifiable information on contributions. Through a large-scale field experiment and a series of laboratory exp...

Fiscal Unions

By Emmanuel Farhi and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, December 2017

We study cross-country risk sharing as a second-best problem for members of a currency union using an open economy model with nominal rigidities and provide two key results. First, we show that if financial markets are incomplete, the value of gaining acc...

Not So Demanding: Demand Structure and Firm Behavior

By Monika Mrázová and J. Peter Neary

American Economic Review, December 2017

We show that any well-behaved demand function can be represented by its "demand manifold," a smooth curve that relates the elasticity and convexity of demand. This manifold is a sufficient statistic for many comparative statics questions; leads naturally ...

Recall and Unemployment

By Shigeru Fujita and Giuseppe Moscarini

American Economic Review, December 2017

We document in the Survey of Income and Program Participation covering the period 1990–2013 that a surprisingly large share of workers return to their previous employer after a jobless spell, and experience very different unemployment and employment...

The Effect of Wealth on Individual and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from Swedish Lotteries

By David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, and Robert Östling

American Economic Review, December 2017

We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. Winning a lottery prize modestly reduces earnings, with the reduction being immediate, persistent, and quite sim...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Immigration in American Economic History

By Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

The United States has long been perceived as a land of opportunity for immigrants. Yet, both in the past and today, US natives have expressed concern that immigrants fail to integrate into US society and lower wages for existing workers. This paper review...

Family Economics Writ Large

By Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, and Guillaume Vandenbroucke

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (1) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (2) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (3) a significant decline...

How Successful Was the New Deal? The Microeconomic Impact of New Deal Spending and Lending Policies in the 1930s

By Price Fishback

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

The New Deal during the 1930s was arguably the largest peace-time expansion in federal government activity in American history. Until recently, there had been very little quantitative testing of the microeconomic impact of the wide variety of New Deal p...

Assessing the Energy-Efficiency Gap

By Todd D. Gerarden, Richard G. Newell, and Robert N. Stavins

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Energy-efficient technologies offer considerable promise for reducing the financial costs and environmental damages associated with energy use, but it has long been observed that these technologies may not be adopted by individuals and firms to the degr...

Ideology, Economic Policy, and Economic History: Cohen and DeLong's Concrete Economics

By Alexander J. Field

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong view US economic policy extending up to 1980 as pragmatically fostering growth. This they interpret as the Hamiltonian tradition, and their intent is to rescue policy debate from the data- and logic-free quagmire in...

Public Economics and History: A Review of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, Edited by Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel

By Philip T. Hoffman

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States greatly expands our knowledge of the history of premodern fiscal systems and raises important questions about the political economy of premodern states. Answering those questions can help...

Group Selection: A Review Essay on Does Altruism Exist? by David Sloan Wilson

By Arthur J. Robson

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

In response to the question in the title, Does Altruism Exist?, David Sloan Wilson argues forcefully that altruism exists and that the biological mechanism of group selection is responsible. He argues that group selection should be taken especially...

The Great Recession in the Shadow of the Great Depression: A Review Essay on Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses and Misuses of History, by Barry Eichengreen

By Lee E. Ohanian

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

This essay compares the Great Depression to the Great Recession in light of Barry Eichengreen's new book Hall of Mirrors. Eichengreen discusses these two episodes from a historical, Keynesian perspective, and concludes that policies that increase a...

A Review Essay on Alvin Roth's Who Gets What—And Why

By Edward L. Glaeser

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Alvin Roth's Who Gets What—And Why provides a richly accessible introduction to his pioneering work on market design. Much of economics ignores the institutions that allocate goods, blithely assuming that the mythical Walrasian auctioneer wil...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017