Horizons of Understanding: A Review of Ray Fair's Estimating How the Macroeconomy Works

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

Ray Fair's Estimating How the Macroeconomy Works is the latest in a series of books by Fair that build, estimate, and apply his macroeconometric model to study the U.S. economy. In this book, Fair updates the model to incorporate the most recent data a...

The Efficacy of Information Policy: A Review of Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil's Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency

By Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

The economics of information has identified an important role for government to correct situations where competition is not sufficient to reveal valuable information to consumers. Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil's Full Disclosure: The Perils a...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

Are We Finally Winning the War on Cancer?

[Symposium: Health Care]

By David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

President Nixon declared what came to be known as the "war on cancer" in 1971 in his State of the Union address. At first the war on cancer went poorly: despite a substantial increase in resources, age-adjusted cancer mortality increased by 8 percent betw...

Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient?

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Alan M. Garber and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

The U.S. health system has been described as the most competitive, heterogeneous, inefficient, fragmented, and advanced system of care in the world. In this paper, we consider two questions: First, is the U.S. healthcare system productively efficient rela...

Incremental Universalism for the United States: The States Move First?

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

The latest wave of health care proposals and laws in the United Sates has been marked by what I call "incremental universalism" -- that is, getting to universal health insurance coverage by filling the gaps in the existing system, rather than ripping up t...

Providing Prescription Drug Coverage to the Elderly: America's Experiment with Medicare Part D

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Mark Duggan, Patrick Healy, and Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

The federal government's Medicare program did not provide general prescription drug coverage for the first 40 years of its existence. Thus, more than 30 percent of the 44 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries of the program lacked insurance coverage ...

Organizational Fragmentation and Care Quality in the U.S. Healthcare System

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Randall D. Cebul, James B. Rebitzer, Lowell J. Taylor, and Mark E. Votruba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Many goods and services can be readily provided through a series of unconnected transactions, but in health care, close coordination over time and within care episodes improves both health outcomes and efficiency. Close coordination is problematic in the ...

Overlapping Generations: The First Jubilee

By Philippe Weil

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Paul Samuelson's (1958) overlapping generations model has turned 50. Seldom has so simple a model been so influential. The paper, in spite of its ripe age, still elicits wonder. Starting from the uncontroversial observation that "we live in a world where ...

The Economic Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

By Jacob Vigdor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept into Louisiana and New Orleans, a city built largely on land reclaimed from swamp, witnessed massive failures in its levees. Much of the city and its surrounding suburbs were inundated; those residents of the ci...

Interpreting the Great Moderation: Changes in the Volatility of Economic Activity at the Macro and Micro Levels

By Steven J. Davis and James A. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Most advanced economies have experienced a striking decline in the volatility of aggregate economic activity since the early 1980s. Volatility reductions are evident for output and employment at the aggregate level and across most industrial sectors and e...

Susan C. Athey: John Bates Clark Award Winner 2007

By John Roberts

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Susan Carleton Athey is the 2007 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, which is "awarded biennially to that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to econ...

Retrospectives: Guinnessometrics: The Economic Foundation of "Student's" t

By Stephen T. Ziliak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

In economics and other sciences, "statistical significance" is by custom, habit, and education a necessary and sufficient condition for proving an empirical result. The canonical routine is to calculate what's called a t-statistic and then to compare its ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Comments

By Jerry H. Tempelman, Hendrik Bessembinder, and William Maxwell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Land and Power: Theory and Evidence from Chile

By Jean-Marie Baland and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, December 2008

Many employment relationships concede rents to workers. Depending on the political institutions, the presence of such rents allows employers to use the threat of withdrawing them to control their workers' political behavior, such as their votes in the ...

The Costs of Remoteness: Evidence from German Division and Reunification

By Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm

American Economic Review, December 2008

This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence for the importance of market access for economic development. In line with a stand...