Why do people give?

[Research Highlight]

November 21, 2017

An interview with Lise Vesterlund on how economics can help us better understand altruism.

A better way to feed the poor

[Page]

A national nonprofit develops a more efficient system to allocate food donations.

Back to work

[Research Highlight]

November 27, 2017

The U.S. labor market is not as flexible as once thought.

Breaking down Brexit

[Page]

Leaving the EU will cost the UK.

Transition Economies: Performance and Challenges

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Jan Svejnar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

I present data and assess the first twelve years of the transition from plan to market. Transformations have taken place, but the income gap between the transition and advanced economies has widened. Transition countries further east have performed worse ...

Environmental Policy Since Earth Day I: What Have We Gained?

By A. Myrick Freeman III

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

I review the data on costs and benefits of the major environmental laws passed during the 1970s. The winners in terms of benefit-cost analysis include: getting lead out of gasoline; controlling particulate air pollution; reducing the concentration of lead...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: The New Economy: Post Mortem or Second Wind?

By Martin Neil Baily

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

There was an acceleration of U.S. productivity after 1995. Investment in information technology hardware and software contributed importantly to this, but was not its sole cause. In part, heavy IT investment, perhaps overinvestment, was the result of the ...

Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection

[Symposium: Evolutionary Economics]

By Theodore C. Bergstrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

How selfish does our evolutionary history suggest that humans will be? We explore models in which groups are formed and dissolved and where reproduction of individuals is determined by their payoffs in a game played within groups. If groups are formed "ra...

Evolution and Human Nature

[Symposium: Evolutionary Economics]

By Arthur J. Robson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This paper considers how biological evolution shaped the elements of a simple but complete model of economic decision making. These elements are preferences, beliefs and rationality. Whereas Nature might impose preferences over consumption on the individu...

Policy Watch: The Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan

By Roger Feldman, Kenneth E. Thorpe, and Bradley Gray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This short feature describes the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP), which provides health insurance benefits to active and retired federal employees and their dependents. The article discusses the FEHBP as a touchstone for research on employm...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

The Inheritance of Inequality

[Symposium: Intergenerational Mobility]

By Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

How level is the intergenerational playing field? What are the causal mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of economic status? Are these mechanisms amenable to public policies in a way that would make the attainment of economic succ...

Is India's Economic Growth Leaving the Poor Behind?

[Symposium: India]

By Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Has poverty continued to fall with growth in India in the 1990s, or has the nature of the growth process changed, such that the poor have been left behind? This paper tries to answer those questions. We do not attempt to assess the impact of India's macro...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Comments

By Robert S. Goldfarb, H. O. Stekler, David Neumark, William Wascher, and T. D. Stanley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

The NAIRU in Theory and Practice

By Laurence Ball and N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

This paper discusses the NAIRU--the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. It first considers the role of the NAIRU concept in business cycle theory, arguing that this concept is implicit in any model in which monetary policy influences both inf...

Modeling the Transition to a New Economy: Lessons from Two Technological Revolutions

By Andrew Atkeson and Patrick J. Kehoe

American Economic Review, March 2007

Many view the period after the Second Industrial Revolution as a paradigm of a transition to a new economy following a technological revolution, including the Information Technology Revolution. We build a quantitative model of diffusion and growth duri...