Report of the Representative to the International Economic Association

American Economic Review, May 2007

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

American Economic Review, May 2007

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

American Economic Review, May 2007

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

American Economic Review, May 2007

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

American Economic Review, May 2007

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2007

Editors' Introduction

By Michelle DeBlasi and Ronald L. Oaxaca

American Economic Review, May 2007

Foreword

By Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Review, May 2007

The American Family and Family Economics

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family (1981) subjected individuals' decisions about sex, marriage, childbearing, and childrearing to rational choice analysis. The American family has changed radically in recent decades; we survey these change...

Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century...

The Economics of Lesbian and Gay Families

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Dan A. Black, Seth G. Sanders, and Lowell J. Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

In this essay, we provide some statistics about the gay and lesbian population in the United States, and ask if analysis based on economic reasoning can provide insight into the family outcomes we observe. We do not start with a hypothesis of innate diffe...

Guess Who's Been Coming to Dinner? Trends in Interracial Marriage over the 20th Century

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Roland G. Fryer Jr.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

This paper studies marriages across black, white, and Asian racial lines. Marrying across racial lines is a rare event, even today. Interracial marriages account for approximately 1 percent of white marriages, 5 percent of black marriages, and 14 percent ...

Biological Basics and the Economics of the Family

[Symposium: Household Economics]

By Donald Cox

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Many economic models of the family are based on a generic "person 1 - person 2" household or "parent - child" family, rather than their anatomically correct counterparts: sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. These ec...

Disagreement and the Stock Market

[Symposium: Behavioral Finance]

By Harrison Hong and Jeremy C. Stein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

A large catalog of variables with no apparent connection to risk has been shown to forecast stock returns, both in the time series and the cross-section. For instance, we see medium-term momentum and post-earnings drift in returns -- the tendency for stoc...

Investor Sentiment in the Stock Market

[Symposium: Behavioral Finance]

By Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Investor sentiment, defined broadly, is a belief about future cash flows and investment risks that is not justified by the facts at hand. The question is no longer whether investor sentiment affects stock prices, but how to measure investor sentiment and ...

What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World?

By Steven D. Levitt and John A. List

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on f...

Hedge Funds: Past, Present, and Future

By René M. Stulz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Assets managed by hedge funds have grown faster over the last ten years than assets managed by mutual funds. Hedge funds and mutual funds perform the same economic function, but hedge funds are largely unregulated while mutual funds are tightly regulated....

How Wages Change: Micro Evidence from the International Wage Flexibility Project

By William T. Dickens, Lorenz Goette, Erica L. Groshen, Steinar Holden, Julian Messina, Mark E. Schweitzer, Jarkko Turunen, and Melanie E. Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Workers' wages are not set in a spot market. Instead, the wages of most workers -- at least those who do not switch jobs -- typically change only annually and are mediated by a complex set of institutions and factors such as contracts, unions, standards o...

Retrospectives: Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

In this article, I discuss some earlier debates about the foundations of utility and its measurement, focusing on the contributions of Francis Y. Edgeworth (1845-1926), a famous British economist who was a leader in the development of a more mathematicall...

Markets: Gift Cards

By Jennifer Pate Offenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

The Mobil Oil Company introduced the first retail gift card that recorded value on a magnetic strip in 1995. In under a decade, such gift cards replaced apparel as the number one item sold during the Christmas season. This study will discuss the reasons f...