Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Socioeconomic Status, Poor Health in Childhood, and Human Capital Development

By Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

There are many possible pathways between parental education, income, and health, and between child health and education, but only some of them have been explored in the literature. This essay focuses on links between parental socioeconomic status (as m...

The Age of Milton Friedman

By Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

Between 1980 and 2005, as the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply, while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined. Is this a coincidence? A collection of essays edited ...

Globalization and the Welfare State: A Review of Hans-Werner Sinn's Can Germany Be Saved?

By Dennis J. Snower, Alessio J. G. Brown, and Christian Merkl

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

What are the challenges that globalization makes on welfare states and how should welfare states respond? How should welfare states be designed to enable countries to reap the benefits of globalization? These are the main themes of Hans-Werner Sinn's b...

What Do (and Don't) We Know about the Value Added Tax? A Review of Richard M. Bird and Pierre-Pascal Gendron's The VAT in Developing and Transitional Countries

By Michael Keen

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

The VAT has taken the tax world by storm over the last fifty years, but left little trace in the academic literature. Bird and Gendron provide an impressively informed and informative account of the VAT experience in lower income countries, largely vind...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

Are There Missing Girls in the United States? Evidence from Birth Data

By Jason Abrevaya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We offer evidence of gender selection within the United States. Analysis of comprehensive birth data shows unusually high boy-birth percentages after 1980 among later children (most notably third and fourth children) born to Chinese and Asian Indian mo...

Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions

By Alan S. Gerber, Dean Karlan, and Daniel Bergan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Was...

Income Inequality and Progressive Income Taxation in China and India, 1986-2015

By Thomas Piketty and Nancy Qian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

This paper evaluates income tax reforms in China and India. The combination of fast income growth and under-indexed tax schedule in China implies the fraction of the Chinese population subject to income tax has increased from less than 0.1 percent in 1...

What Determines Giving to Hurricane Katrina Victims? Experimental Evidence on Racial Group Loyalty

By Christina M. Fong and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We investigate the role of racial group loyalty on generosity in a broadly representative sample of the US adult population. We use an audiovisual presentation to manipulate beliefs about the race, income, and worthiness of Hurricane Katrina victims. R...

Do Labor Market Rigidities Have Microeconomic Effects? Evidence from within the Firm

By Francine Lafontaine and Jagadeesh Sivadasan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We exploit a unique outlet-level dataset from a multinational chain with over 2,500 outlets in 43 countries to investigate the effects of labor regulations that protect employment. The dataset contains information on output, materials, and labor costs ...

A Cautionary Tale about the Use of Administrative Data: Evidence from Age of Marriage Laws

By Rebecca M. Blank, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and James M. Sallee

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

This paper demonstrates that administrative data may be inferior to survey data under particular circumstances. We examine the effect of state laws governing the minimum age of marriage in the United States. The estimated effects of these laws are much...

A Biological Model of Unions

By Michael Kremer and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

This paper applies principles from evolutionary biology to the study of unions. We show that unions that implement the preferred wage and organizing policies of workers will be displaced in evolutionary competition by unions that either extract less fr...

History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa

By Elise Huillery

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

To what extent do colonial public investments continue to influence current regional inequalities in French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database and the spatial discontinuities of colonial investment policy, this paper gives evidence that early c...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2009

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Jane E. Voros

American Economic Review, May 2009

Foreword

By Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, May 2009

Immigration and Inequality

By David Card

American Economic Review, May 2009