Are You Sure You're Saving Enough for Retirement?

[Symposium: The Adequacy of Retirement Saving]

By Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Many view the soon-to-retire Baby Boomers as woefully unprepared for their golden years, while other economists have taken a more sanguine view of American levels of saving. And if Americans are failures at saving enough for retirement, why are some retir...

Heuristics and Biases in Retirement Savings Behavior

[Symposium: The Adequacy of Retirement Saving]

By Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Standard economic theories of saving implicitly assume that households have the cognitive ability to solve the relevant optimization problem and the willpower to execute the optimal plan. Both of the implicit assumptions are suspect. Even among economists...

Firms in International Trade

By Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Since the mid-1990s, researchers have used micro datasets to study countries' production and trade at the firm level and have found that exporting firms differ substantially from firms that solely serve the domestic market. Across a wide range of countrie...

Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalization

By David Hummels

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

While the precise causes of postwar trade growth are not well understood, declines in transport costs top the lists of usual suspects. However, there is remarkably little systematic evidence documenting the decline. This paper brings to bear an eclectic m...

Does Antitrust Need to be Modernized?

By Dennis W. Carlton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Economics has had an enormous positive effect on the evolution of antitrust policy over the last 30 years or so. However, the evolving forces of technology and globalization, together with experience gained over time, suggest that further modernization is...

The Causes and Consequences of Wal-Mart's Growth

By Emek Basker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer and the largest private employer in the United States. The competitive pressures created by large retailers have long been controversial, and Wal-Mart's growth has raised concerns about its economic impact on workers, comm...

Natural Disasters, Economic Development, and Humanitarian Aid

By David Strömberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Natural disasters are one of the major problems facing humankind. Between 1980 and 2004, two million people were reported killed and five billion people cumulatively affected by around 7,000 natural disasters, according to the dataset maintained by the Ce...

Human Capital and the Productivity of Suicide Bombers

By Efraim Benmelech and Claude Berrebi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

This paper studies the relation between the human capital of suicide bombers and the outcomes of their suicide attacks. We argue that human capital is an important factor in the production of terrorism and that if terrorists behave rationally, we should o...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Reputations, Relationships, and Contract Enforcement

By W. Bentley MacLeod

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

When the quality of a good is at the discretion of the seller, how can buyers assure that the seller provides the mutually efficient level of quality? Contracts that provide a bonus to the seller if the quality is acceptable or impose a penalty on the s...

Vertical Integration and Firm Boundaries: The Evidence

By Francine Lafontaine and Margaret Slade

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

Since Ronald H. Coase's (1937) seminal paper, a rich set of theories has been developed that deal with firm boundaries in vertical or input–output structures. In the last twenty-five years, empirical evidence that can shed light on those theories also...

A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change

By William D. Nordhaus

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. An exami...

A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change

By Martin L. Weitzman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

The Stern Review calls for immediate decisive action to stabilize greenhouse gases because "the benefits of strong, early action on climate change outweighs the costs." The economic analysis supporting this conclusion consists mostly of two basic...

A Review of Avner Greif's Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade

By Gregory Clark

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

Avner Greif's Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is a major work in the ongoing project of many economists and economic historians to show that institutions are the funda...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

Reference-Dependent Risk Attitudes

By Botond Kőszegi and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, September 2007

We use Koszegi and Rabin's (2006) model of reference-dependent utility, and an extension of it that applies to decisions with delayed consequences, to study preferences over monetary risk. Because our theory equates the reference point with recent prob...

Mismatch

By Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, September 2007

This paper develops a dynamic model of mismatch. Workers and jobs are randomly allocated to labor markets. Each market clears, but some have excess (unemployed) workers and some have excess (vacant) jobs. As workers and jobs switch markets, unemployed ...