Reference-Dependent Preferences and Labor Supply: The Case of New York City Taxi Drivers

By Henry S. Farber

American Economic Review, June 2008

I develop a model of daily labor supply where preferences are dependent on a reference daily income level, and I apply this model to data on the labor supply of New York City taxi drivers. I find that there may be a reference level of income on a given da...

The Interaction of Public and Private Insurance: Medicaid and the Long-Term Care Insurance Market

By Jeffrey R. Brown and Amy Finkelstein

American Economic Review, June 2008

We show that even incomplete public insurance can crowd out private insurance demand. We estimate that Medicaid could explain the lack of private long-term care insurance for about two-thirds of the wealth distribution, even if no other factors limited th...

Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan's Laws

By Leigh Linden and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, June 2008

We estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move-in dates of sex offenders. We find significant effects of sex offenders' locations that are geographically localized. House prices within 0.1 miles of a sex offend...

Ordering the Extraction of Polluting Nonrenewable Resources

By Ujjayant Chakravorty, Michel Moreaux, and Mabel Tidball

American Economic Review, June 2008

A well-known theorem by Herfindahl states that the low-cost nonrenewable resource must be exploited first. Consider resources that are differentiated only by their pollution content. For instance, both coal and natural gas are used to generate electricity...

Strotz Meets Allais: Diminishing Impatience and the Certainty Effect

By Yoram Halevy

American Economic Review, June 2008

Decision makers tend to exhibit a higher degree of impatience when considering a delay to an immediate reward than when contemplating an identical delay to an equal future reward. This work argues that diminishing impatience originates from the distinctio...

Monetary Policy, Judgment, and Near-Rational Exuberance

By James Bullard, George W. Evans, and Seppo Honkapohja

American Economic Review, June 2008

We study how the use of judgment or "add-factors" in macroeconomic forecasting may disturb the set of equilibrium outcomes when agents learn using recursive methods. We examine the possibility of a new phenomenon, which we call exuberance equilibria, in t...

Evolution of Time Preference by Natural Selection: Comment

By Arthur J. Robson and Balazs Szentes

American Economic Review, June 2008

We reexamine Alan R. Rogers' (1994) analysis of the biological basis of the rate of time preference. Although his basic insight concerning the derivation of the utility function holds up, the functional form he uses does not generate equilibrium evolution...

Matching with Contracts: Comment

By John William Hatfield and Fuhito Kojima

American Economic Review, June 2008

Hatfield and Milgrom (2005) present a unified model of matching with contracts phrased in terms of hospitals and doctors, which subsumes the standard two-sided matching and some package auction models. They show that a stable allocation exists if contract...

When Does Coordination Require Centralization? Corrigendum

By Ricardo Alonso, Wouter Dessein, and Niko Matouschek

American Economic Review, June 2008

Independent Auditors' Report

American Economic Review, June 2008

The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins

By Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. We su...

Transfers in Cash and In-Kind: Theory Meets the Data

By Janet Currie and Firouz Gahvari

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

We review theoretical explanations for in-kind transfers in light of the limited empirical evidence. After reviewing the traditional paternalistic arguments, we consider explanations based on imperfect information and self-targeting. We then discuss the...

Is the U.S. Labor Market Really That Exceptional? A Review of Richard Freeman

By Stephen Nickell

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

America Works is a splendid book and Richard Freeman is to be congratulated on producing a work that sets out what is right and what is wrong with the U.S. labor market while being a joy to read. While I am generally sympathetic to both the analysis an...

The Enigma of India

By Kaushik Basu

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

India's high growth over the last fifteen years has inspired several recent books and papers to examine the growth's source and sustainability--the two-volume study by Arvind Virmani being a case in point. This paper evaluates these recent works. It is ...

A Review of David Colander's The Making of an Economist, Redux

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

David Colander's update/reworking of his 1987 volume draws conclusions about graduate study in economics from interviews with students in selected leading U.S. programs. Although not formally statistical, the interviews support the conclusion that most...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

JEL Classifications

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility within Developed Nations

[Symposium: Investment in Children]

By James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, and Ariel Dora Stern

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

We seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high-income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household, particularly with regards to child care and home p...

Parental Education and Parental Time with Children

[Symposium: Investment in Children]

By Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst, and Melissa Kearney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one's children. Using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight some interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children: we f...