Workforce Development in the United States: Recent Trends and Evidence

By Harry J. Holzer

Journal of Economic Literature

In this paper, I examine what we know and don’t know about both private and public workforce development in the US. I highlight three of the most important categories of programs and policy: a) Workforce development in accredited higher education instit...

Hazards of Expropriation: Tenure Insecurity and Investment in Rural China

By Hanan G. Jacoby, Guo Li, and Scott Rozelle

American Economic Review, December 2002

We use household data from northeast China to examine the link between investment and land tenure insecurity induced by China's system of village-level land reallocation. We quantify expropriation risk using a hazard analysis of individual plot tenures an...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

How Regional Inequality and Migration Drive Housing Prices and Rents

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Greg Howard and Jack Liebersohn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

We argue that rising regional inequality contributes to higher average housing prices and rents. We show three key empirical facts that contribute to this mechanism: first, income growth has been faster in already high-income cities; second, people are dr...

Curbing Rising Housing Costs: A Model-Based Policy Comparison

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Boaz Abramson and Tim Landvoigt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

Recent decades have seen house prices grow strongly relative to incomes, making housing ever less affordable. We develop and quantify a model of segmented housing markets to study the drivers of rising housing costs and to evaluate policies aimed at curbi...

The Folk Economics of Housing

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, and Stan Oklobdzija

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said ...

Building Costs and House Prices

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Brian Potter and Chad Syverson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

We take a long, broad, and theoretically agnostic view toward the connection between building costs and house prices in the US housing market. We find that building costs have never had all that much explanatory power over US housing prices, but even the ...

International Dimensions of Housing Markets

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Cristian Badarinza and Tarun Ramadorai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

We make the case that an international perspective on housing markets can help us understand why house prices and transactions volumes sometimes vary in ways that cannot easily be attributed to local economic factors. We first document cross-country and c...

Interview with Anne O. Krueger

By Dylan Matthews

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

Matthews interviews eminent international economist Anne O. Krueger, tracing her life in academia and her service at multilateral economic institutions, and explaining her myriad intellectual contributions to the field. Krueger recounts her early skeptici...

Protecting Antiquities: A Role for Long-Term Leases?

By Michael Kremer and Tom Wilkening

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

In order to preserve cultural patrimony for future generations, most countries ban exports of antiquities. However, this may drive trade underground, particularly in low-income and low-state capacity contexts, and cause irreversible damage to cultural her...

Basel Endgame: Bank Capital Requirements and the Future of International Standard Setting

By Stephen Cecchetti, Jeremy Kress, and Kermit Schoenholtz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

In 2023, US regulators proposed the "Basel Endgame," a long-awaited overhaul of bank capital requirements. The proposal aimed to bring the United States into compliance with international standards established by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision...

Two-Class Voting: A Mechanism for Conflict Resolution

By Ernst Maug and Bilge Yilmaz

American Economic Review, December 2002

We discuss two-class voting procedures where voters are divided into classes and a separate majority is required in each class. Examples include Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and some political mechanisms. We investigate how voting mechanisms aggregat...

Carbon Rollercoaster: A Historical Analysis of Decarbonization in the United States

By Karen Clay, Akshaya Jha, Joshua Lewis, and Edson Severnini

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

This paper documents the changing trends in US carbon emissions and discusses the main factors that contributed to the historical carbon emissions rollercoaster. We divide the discussion into four periods: up to 1920, 1920–1960, 1960–2005 and after 20...

Text as Data in Economic Analysis

By Tarek A. Hassan, Stephan Hollander, Aakash Kalyani, Laurence van Lent, Markus Schwedeler, and Ahmed Tahoun

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

This article discusses how to apply computational linguistics techniques to analyze largely unstructured corporate-generated text for economic analysis. As a core example, we illustrate how textual analysis of earnings conference call transcripts can prov...

How Congress Designed the Federal Reserve to Be Independent of Presidential Control

By Gary Richardson and David W. Wilcox

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

Conventional wisdom traces the origins of the Federal Reserve's independence to the 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord. That rendition of history is inaccurate. The principal source of the Fed's monetary-policy independence is the Banking Act of 1935, which created...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

What Drives the Recent Surge in Inflation? The Historical Decomposition Roller Coaster

By Drago Bergholt, Fabio Canova, Francesco Furlanetto, Nicolò Maffei-Faccioli, and Pål Ulvedal

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

What drives the recent inflation surge? To answer this question, one must decompose inflation fluctuations into the contribution of structural shocks. We document how whimsical an historical shock decomposition can be in standard vector autoregressive ...

Racial Profiling, Fairness, and Effectiveness of Policing

By Nicola Persico

American Economic Review, December 2002

Citizens of two groups may engage in crime, depending on their legal earning opportunities and on the probability of being audited. Police audit citizens. Police behavior is fair if both groups are policed with the same intensity. We provide exact conditi...

Long-Term Securities and Banking Crises

By Jianjun Miao, Zhouxiang Shen, and Dongling Su

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We incorporate banks into a DSGE framework to study how interest rate hikes affect the macroeconomy. The procyclical bank balance sheets and long-term bond prices amplify adverse shocks, which can trigger a bank run. We introduce a macroprudential pol...

Alcohol, Labor, and Agriculture

By David M. A. Murphy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

I evaluate a randomized control trial in rural Kenya in which selected households received cognitive behavioral therapy and medication to reduce alcohol abuse. Sixteen months post-intervention, the program decreased the likelihood of positive spot brea...