Interview with Robert A. Mundell

By Howard R. Vane and Chris Mulhearn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Robert A. Mundell has been Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York City, New York, since 1974 and University Professor since 2001. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science "for his analysis of monetary and fis...

Avoiding Invalid Instruments and Coping with Weak Instruments

By Michael P. Murray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Archimedes said, "Give me the place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the Earth." Economists have their own powerful lever: the instrumental variable estimator. The instrumental variable estimator can avoid the bias that ordinary least s...

The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap

By Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor's degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the na...

The London Congestion Charge

By Jonathan Leape

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

By the 1990s, the average speed of trips across London was below that at the beginning of the twentieth century -- before the car was introduced -- and by the end of that decade, public concern over levels of traffic congestion was high. In early 2003, Lo...

How Richard Nixon Pressured Arthur Burns: Evidence from the Nixon Tapes

By Burton A. Abrams

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Evidence from the Nixon tapes, now available to researchers, shows that President Richard Nixon pressured the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, to engage in expansionary monetary policies in the run-up to the 1972 election. This paper quotes...

What Has Mattered to Economics Since 1970

By E. Han Kim, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Citations are one way that past research echoes through time. In this paper, we compile a list of articles published in major refereed economics journals in the last 35 years that have received more than 500 citations as of June 2006. We then use this lis...

Markets: The U.S. Lodging Industry

By Arturs Kalnins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

The U.S. lodging industry appears highly competitive. Ownership concentration appears to be low. Fixed costs are high relative to variable costs and unused rooms cannot be stored for future sale, so price-cutting should be attractive. However, this paper ...

Policy Watch: Examining the Justification for Residential Recycling

By Thomas C. Kinnaman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

There are 8,875 municipalities in the United States that have initiated curbside recycling programs over the past two decades to help reduce residential solid waste. Four thousand of these municipalities encourage recycling by requiring households to pay...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Accounting for the Growth of MNC-Based Trade Using a Structural Model of U.S. MNCs

By Susan E. Feinberg and Michael P. Keane

American Economic Review, December 2006

In recent decades, U.S. foreign trade grew much faster than GDP, but there is no consensus why. Notably lacking is an understanding of the role of multinational corporations (MNCs), which mediate over half of world trade. We use Bureau of Economic Anal...

Inherited Control and Firm Performance

By Francisco Pérez-González

American Economic Review, December 2006

I use data from chief executive officer (CEO) successions to examine the impact of inherited control on firms’ performance. I find that firms where incoming CEOs are related to the departing CEO, to a founder, or to a large shareholder by either blood ...

Estimating the Effects of Global Patent Protection in Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study of Quinolones in India

By Shubham Chaudhuri, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, and Panle Jia

American Economic Review, December 2006

Under the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights, the World Trade Organization members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. In this paper we empirically investigate the welfare effects of this requirement on dev...

A Dual-Self Model of Impulse Control

By Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine

American Economic Review, December 2006

We propose that a simple “dual-self” model gives a unified explanation for several empirical regularities, including the apparent time inconsistency that has motivated models of quasi-hyperbolic discounting and Rabin’s paradox of risk aversion in the...

Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?

By Susanto Basu, John G. Fernald, and Miles S. Kimball

American Economic Review, December 2006

Yes. We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for aggregation effects, varying utilization of capital and labor, nonconstant returns, and imperfect competition. On impact, when technology improves, input use and nonresidential...

Quantitative Aggregate Economics

By Finn E. Kydland

American Economic Review, December 2006

Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico: Using a Social Experiment to Validate a Dynamic Behavioral Model of Child Schooling and Fertility

By Petra E. Todd and Kenneth I. Wolpin

American Economic Review, December 2006

This paper uses data from a randomized social experiment in Mexico to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling, to evaluate the effects of the PROGRESA school subsidy program, and to per...

Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments: Comment

By Ernst Fehr, Michael Naef, and Klaus M. Schmidt

American Economic Review, December 2006

Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments: Reply

By Dirk Engelmann and Martin Strobel

American Economic Review, December 2006