Monopsony, Mobility, and Sex Differences in Pay: Missouri School Teachers

By Michael R. Ransom and Val E. Lambson

American Economic Review, May 2011

We examine the sex differences in the pay of school teachers in Missouri. In Missouri school districts, pay is determined by a salary schedule that maps teaching experience and education level of an individual to a salary level. In spite of this apparentl...

Agglomeration of Invention in the Bay Area: Not Just ICT

By Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein

American Economic Review, May 2016

We document that the Bay Area rose from 4% of all successful US patent applications in 1976 to 16% in 2008. This is partly driven by the increase in the prevalence of information and communication technology; however, even for patents unrelated to informa...

Stop the Clock Policies and Career Success in Academia

By Colleen Flaherty Manchester, Lisa M. Leslie, and Amit Kramer

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Administrative Foundations of Self-Enforcing Constitutions

By Yadira Gonzalez de Lara, Avner Greif, and Saumitra Jha

American Economic Review, May 2008

The Effect of Absenteeism and Clinic Protocol on Health Outcomes: The Case of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV in Kenya

By Markus Goldstein, Joshua Graff Zivin, James Habyarimana, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Harsha Thirumurthy

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

We show that pregnant women whose first clinic visit coincides with the nurse's attendance are 58 percentage points more likely to test for HIV and 46 percent more likely to deliver in a hospital. Furthermore, women with high pretest expectations of be...

Risk Protection, Service Use, and Health Outcomes under Colombia's Health Insurance Program for the Poor

By Grant Miller, Diana Pinto, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Unexpected medical care spending imposes considerable financial risk on developing country households. Based on managed care models of health insurance in wealthy countries, Colombia's Régimen Subsidiado is a publicly financed insurance program target...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

The Productivity Slowdown, the Oil Shocks, and the Real Cycle

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Mancur Olson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Five facts stand out about economic performance in the United States since World War II. The first is that, for most of the postwar period, the U.S. has had a slower rate of economic growth than the other major developed democracies except Great Britain, ...

Inflation and Price Adjustments: Micro Evidence from Norwegian Consumer Prices 1975-2004

By Fredrik Wulfsberg

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

This is the first paper documenting the frequency and size of price adjustments using micro data from both the high-inflation period in the 1970s and 1980s, and the period of low inflation since the early 1990s. When inflation is high and volatile, prices...

The Journal of Economic Perspectives at 100 (Issues)

[Symposium: 100 Issues of JEP]

By David Autor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

When I was a graduate student, I discovered that the Journal of Economic Perspectives embodied much of what I love about the field of economics: the clarity that pierces rhetoric to seek the core of a question; the rigor to identify the causal re...

2017 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 13, 2017

Economists tackled gender issues, education, globalization, and more.

Competence Implies Credibility

By Giuseppe Moscarini

American Economic Review, March 2007

The (reputation for) competence of a central bank at doing its job makes monetary policy under discretion credible and transparent. Based on its reading of the state of the economy, the central bank announces its policy intentions to the public in a ch...

Excessive Financing Costs in a Representative Agent Framework

By Maya Eden

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2016

This paper highlights a pecuniary externality that results in excessive financing costs. Firms borrow to finance purchases of an inelastically supplied input, bidding up its price. Since higher input prices necessitate more debt obligations, this leads to...

Testing for Indeterminacy: An Application to U.S. Monetary Policy: Comment

By Andreas Beyer and Roger E. A. Farmer

American Economic Review, March 2007

Conditional Retrospective Voting in Large Elections

By Ignacio Esponda and Demian Pouzo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

We introduce a solution concept in the context of large elections with private information by embedding a model of boundedly rational voters into an otherwise standard equilibrium setting. A retrospective voting equilibrium (RVE) formalizes the idea that ...

Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time

By Charles I. Jones and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, September 2016

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-c...

Optimal Expectations and Limited Medical Testing: Evidence from Huntington Disease

By Emily Oster, Ira Shoulson, and E. Ray Dorsey

American Economic Review, April 2013

We use novel data to study genetic testing among individuals at risk for Huntington disease (HD), a hereditary disease with limited life expectancy. Although genetic testing is perfectly predictive and carries little economic cost, presymptomatic testi...

Ex Ante Policy Evaluation, Structural Estimation and Model Selection

By Kenneth I. Wolpin

American Economic Review, May 2007

Why Do Firms Have "Purpose"? The Firm's Role as a Carrier of Identity and Reputation

By Rebecca Henderson and Eric Van den Steen

American Economic Review, May 2015

This article develops a theory in which a firm's adoption of a prosocial purpose can increase profitability by strengthening employees' reputation and identity—leading to higher effort and lower wages—as long as implementing purpose is costly ...

Gender Differences in the Allocation of Low-Promotability Tasks: The Role of Backlash

By Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines whether backlash exacerbates gender differences in time spent on low-promotability tasks. We ask whether gender differences found in previous research--women receiving more requests than men to do these tasks and women being more likel...