Is the EITC as Good as an NIT? Conditional Cash Transfers and Tax Incidence

By Jesse Rothstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

The EITC is intended to encourage work. But EITC-induced increases in labor supply may drive wages down. I simulate the economic incidence of the EITC. In each scenario that I consider, a large portion of low-income single mothers' EITC payments is cap...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

How Debt Markets Have Malfunctioned in the Crisis

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Arvind Krishnamurthy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

The financial crisis that began in 2007 is especially a crisis in debt markets. A full understanding of what happened in the financial crisis requires investigation into the plumbing of debt markets. During a financial crisis, when funds often cannot be r...

When Safe Proved Risky: Commercial Paper during the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Marcin Kacperczyk and Philipp Schnabl

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Commercial paper is a short-term debt instrument issued by large corporations. The commercial paper market has long been viewed as a bastion of high liquidity and low risk. But twice during the financial crisis of 2007-2009, the commercial paper market ne...

The Failure Mechanics of Dealer Banks

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Darrell Duffie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

During the recent financial crisis, major dealer banks -- that is, banks that intermediate markets for securities and derivatives -- suffered from new forms of bank runs. The most vivid examples are the 2008 failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. D...

Credit Default Swaps and the Credit Crisis

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Rene M. Stulz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Many observers have argued that credit default swaps contributed significantly to the credit crisis. Of particular concern to these observers are that credit default swaps trade in the largely unregulated over-the-counter market as bilateral contracts inv...

Did Fair-Value Accounting Contribute to the Financial Crisis?

[Symposium: Financial Plumbing]

By Christian Laux and Christian Leuz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exace...

Mental Retirement

[Symposium: Retirement and Work Choices]

By Susann Rohwedder and Robert J. Willis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Early retirement appears to have a significant negative impact on the cognitive ability of people in their early 60s that is both quantitatively important and causal. We obtain this finding using cross-nationally comparable survey data from the United Sta...

How Longer Work Lives Ease the Crunch of Population Aging

[Symposium: Retirement and Work Choices]

By Nicole Maestas and Julie Zissimopoulos

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Population aging is not a looming crisis of the future -- it is already here. Economic challenges arise when the increase in people surviving to old age and the decline in the number of young people alive to support them cause the growth in society's cons...

What the Stock Market Decline Means for the Financial Security and Retirement Choices of the Near-Retirement Population

[Symposium: Retirement and Work Choices]

By Alan L. Gustman, Thomas L. Steinmeier, and Nahid Tabatabai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

This paper investigates the effect of the current recession on the retirement age population. Data from the Health and Retirement Study suggest that those approaching retirement age (early boomers ages 53 to 58 in 2006) have only 15.2 percent of their wea...

Economic Theory and the World of Practice: A Celebration of the (S, s) Model

By Andrew Caplin and John Leahy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

It was the question of how best to balance the costs of ordering and of running out of stock against the costs of holding excess inventory that inspired Kenneth Arrow, Theodore Harris, and Jacob Marschak to introduce the (S, s) model in...

Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?

By Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. In this paper, we present evidence on a possible explanation for persistent differences in productivity at the firm and the national level -- namely,...

Retrospectives: Engel Curves

By Andreas Chai and Alessio Moneta

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Engel curves describe how household expenditure on particular goods or services depends on household income. German statistician Ernst Engel (1821-1896) was the first to investigate this relationship systematically in an article published about 150 years ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2010

Front Matter includes photograph of Angus S. Deaton as part of a series of photographs of past presidents of the Association.

Price Indexes, Inequality, and the Measurement of World Poverty

By Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, March 2010

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, ...

Learning about a New Technology: Pineapple in Ghana

By Timothy G. Conley and Christopher R. Udry

American Economic Review, March 2010

This paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agricultural technology in Ghana. We use unique data on farmers' communication patterns to define each individual's information neighborhood. Conditional on many potentially ...