Report of the Committee on Economic Statistics

By Katharine Abraham

American Economic Review, May 2009

AEJ: Macroeconomics: Search Committee Recommendation

American Economic Review, May 2009

Note from the Editor: Online Comments for American Economic Association Journals

By David H. Autor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Market-Based Policy Options to Control U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Gilbert E. Metcalf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

The United States is moving closer to enacting a policy to reduce domestic emissions of greenhouse gases. A key element in any plan to reduce emissions will be to place a price on greenhouse gas emissions. This paper discusses the different approaches t...

The Economic Effects of Climate Change

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Richard S. J. Tol

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

I review the literature on the economic impacts of climate change, an externality that is unprecedentedly large, complex, and uncertain. Only 14 estimates of the total damage cost of climate change have been published, a research effort that is in sharp c...

The Coming Global Climate-Technology Revolution

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Scott Barrett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases can be reduced significantly using existing technologies, but stabilizing concentrations will require a technological revolution--a "revolution" because it will require fundamental change, achieved within a rela...

The Role of Prices in Measuring the Poor's Living Standards

[Symposium: Price Variation for Households]

By Christian Broda, Ephraim Leibtag, and David E. Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

In this paper, we revisit two pieces of conventional wisdom in the current debate about poverty, paying close attention to the price data underlying these findings: that the poor pay more than households of higher income for the goods and services they pu...

Consumer Shopping Behavior: How Much Do Consumers Save?

[Symposium: Price Variation for Households]

By Rachel Griffith, Ephraim Leibtag, Andrew Leicester, and Aviv Nevo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

This paper documents the potential and actual savings that consumers realize from four particular types of purchasing behavior: purchasing on sale; buying in bulk (at a lower per unit price); buying generic brands; and choosing outlets. How much can and d...

The Nominal Share Price Puzzle

By William C. Weld, Roni Michaely, Richard H. Thaler, and Shlomo Benartzi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

The average nominal share prices of common stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have remained constant at approximately $35 per share since the Great Depression as a result of stock splits. It is surprising that U.S. firms actively maintained cons...

(Un)happiness in Transition

By Sergei Guriev and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Despite strong growth performance in transition economies in the last decade, residents of transition countries report abnormally low levels of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey and other sources, we study various explanations of ...

Faculty without Students: Resource Allocation in Higher Education

By William R. Johnson and Sarah Turner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Colleges and universities display substantial differences in the ratio of students to faculty across fields or disciplines. At Harvard University, for example, economics has about 16 students majoring in the subject per full-time-teaching equivalent, whil...

Legal Realism for Economists

By Matthew C. Stephenson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Economists have made great progress in understanding the incentives and behavior of actors who operate outside of traditional economic markets, including voters, legislators, and bureaucrats. The incentives and behavior of judges, however, remain largely ...

Retrospectives: Who Said "Debauch the Currency": Keynes or Lenin?

By Michael V. White and Kurt Schuler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

One frequently quoted passage from the work of John Maynard Keynes is that "the best way to destroy the capitalist system [is] to debauch the currency." The passage, attributed to Vladimir Illyich Lenin, appears in Keynes' book The Economic Consequenc...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Independent Auditor's Report

American Economic Review, June 2009

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2009

Includes "Walter Erwin Diewert: Distinguished Fellow 2009"

The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography

By Paul Krugman

American Economic Review, June 2009

Thirty years have passed since a small group of theorists began applying concepts and tools from industrial organization to the analysis of international trade. The new models of trade that emerged from that work didn't supplant traditional trade theory...

Bureaucratic Minimal Squawk Behavior: Theory and Evidence from Regulatory Agencies

By Clare Leaver

American Economic Review, June 2009

This paper develops a model in which a desire to avoid criticism prompts otherwise public-spirited bureaucrats to behave inefficiently. Decisions are taken to keep interest groups quiet and to keep mistakes out of the public eye. The policy implication...

Incentives and Stability in Large Two-Sided Matching Markets

By Fuhito Kojima and Parag A. Pathak

American Economic Review, June 2009

A number of labor markets and student placement systems can be modeled as many-to-one matching markets. We analyze the scope for manipulation in many-to-one matching markets under the student-optimal stable mechanism when the number of participants is ...