Earnings Losses of Displaced Workers Revisited

By Kenneth A. Couch and Dana W. Placzek

American Economic Review, March 2010

Earnings losses of Connecticut workers affected by mass layoff are calculated using administrative data. Estimated reductions are initially more than 30 percent and six years later, as much as 15 percent. The Connecticut estimates are smaller than compara...

The Effect of Medicare Part D on Pharmaceutical Prices and Utilization

By Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton

American Economic Review, March 2010

Medicare Part D began coverage of prescription drugs in 2006. Rather than setting pharmaceutical prices, the government contracted with private insurers to provide drug coverage. Theory suggests that additional insured consumers will raise the optimal pri...

Generalizing the Taylor Principle: Comment

By Roger E. A. Farmer, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha

American Economic Review, March 2010

Troy Davig and Eric Leeper (2007) have proposed a condition they call the generalized Taylor principle to rule out indeterminate equilibria in a version of the new-Keynesian model where the parameters of the policy rule follow a Markov-switching process....

Generalizing the Taylor Principle: Reply

By Troy Davig and Eric M. Leeper

American Economic Review, March 2010

Farmer, Waggoner, and Zha (2009) (FWZ) show that a new Keynesian model with regime-switching monetary policy can support multiple solutions, appearing to contradict findings in Davig and Leeper (2007) (DL). The explanation is straightforward: FWZ derive s...

All-or-Nothing Monitoring: Comment

By Bo Chen

American Economic Review, March 2010

Zhao (2008) presents an interesting "all-or-nothing monitoring" result for a multitask moral hazard agency problem with partial effort observation. We argue that the optimal contract based on the non-verifiable observation of the agent's effort in Zhao (2...

Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States: Comment

By Gary E. Bolton and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, March 2010

In a series of binary choice problems, we investigate how a chooser's risk taking changes when others share in their personal risk, either equally or unequally. We find that when the safe option yields inequality, the risky option is taken significantly m...

Excellence in Refereeing Award

American Economic Review, March 2010

Civil War

By Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. Yet while civil war is central to many nations' development, it has stood at the periphery of economics research and teaching. The past decade has witnessed a long overdue explosion o...

The Role of Boards of Directors in Corporate Governance: A Conceptual Framework and Survey

By Renee B. Adams, Benjamin E. Hermalin, and Michael S. Weisbach

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Benjamin E. Hermalin and Michael S. Weisbach (2003) survey. The two questions most asked about boards are what determines their makeup ...

A Review of Scott E. Page's The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

By Yannis M. Ioannides

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

This assessment of Scott Page's The Difference (Princeton University Press, 2007) emphasizes the depth and breadth of the book's coverage and arguments and checks them against existing empirical evidence, when available. It argues that the book...

How Central Should the Central Bank Be?

By Alan S. Blinder

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

The nature and scope of the Federal Reserve's authority and the structure of its decision making are now "on the table" to an extent that has not been seen since 1935, and the Fed's vaunted independence is under some attack. This essay asks what the Fed...

What Powers for the Federal Reserve?

By Martin Feldstein

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

In this essay, I explain my reasons for the following policy recommendations: (1) The Fed should continue to manage monetary policy as it has in the past, should act as the nation's lender of last resort, should fully supervise the large bank holding co...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

Malaria Eradication in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure

By Hoyt Bleakley

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

This study uses the malaria-eradication campaigns in the United States (circa 1920) and in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (circa 1955) to measure how much childhood exposure to malaria depresses labor productivity. The campaigns began because of advances...

Malaria Eradication and Educational Attainment: Evidence from Paraguay and Sri Lanka

By Adrienne M. Lucas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Mid-twentieth century malaria eradication campaigns largely eliminated malaria from Paraguay and Sri Lanka. Using these interventions as quasi-experiments, I estimate malaria's effect on lifetime female educational attainment through the combination of...

Early-Life Malaria Exposure and Adult Outcomes: Evidence from Malaria Eradication in India

By David Cutler, Winnie Fung, Michael Kremer, Monica Singhal, and Tom Vogl

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We examine the effects of exposure to malaria in early childhood on educational attainment and economic status in adulthood by exploiting geographic variation in malaria prevalence in India prior to a nationwide eradication program in the 1950s. We fin...

Ability, Gender, and Performance Standards: Evidence from Academic Probation

By Jason M. Lindo, Nicholas J. Sanders, and Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

We use a regression discontinuity design to examine students' responses to being placed on academic probation. Consistent with a model of introducing performance standards, we find that being placed on probation at the end of the first year discourages...