Retrospectives: American Economists in the Progressive Era on the Minimum Wage

By Robert E. Prasch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

Beginning in 1912, a number of states passed minimum wage legislation that applied exclusively to women and minors. These tentative experiments in economic legislation ended in 1923 when the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia's minimum wage...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

Correspondence

By Arthur B. Kennickell, F. Thomas Juster, James P. Smith, and Frank P. Stafford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

Why Has Africa Grown Slowly?

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By Paul Collier and Jan Willem Gunning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

We distinguish between policy and "destiny" explanations of Africa's slow growth during the past three decades. Policies were poor: high export taxation and inefficient public service delivery, and "destiny" was adverse: landlocked, tropical locations, an...

Commodity Prices and Growth in Africa

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

African states that came to independence by the late 1960s made a rapid transition to authoritarian rule during a period of reasonably robust growth. Growth then faltered badly from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s as these regimes coped with external shock...

Governance and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By Benno J. Ndulu and Stephen A. O'Connell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Real income per head in much of sub-Saharan Africa grew rapidly in the 1960s, but faltered following the first OPEC oil price shock in 1973-74, and then stagnated or fell from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Africa also saw a broad wave of authoritaria...

Health and Schooling Investments in Africa

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By T. Paul Schultz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Intercountry comparisons show Africa's health and education falls short of other regions, controlling for income, women's educations, and urbanization, but growth regressions do not clarify whether this low human capital caused slow growth. Microeconometr...

Africa's Economic Performance: Limitations of the Current Consensus

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By John Sender

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Historical and micro-survey evidence, as well as the standard data from international organizations, support less pessimistic conclusions on Africa's development performance than those reached by many social scientists. The changes that have benefited wom...

The Labor Market for New Ph.D. Economists

By John J. Siegfried and Wendy A. Stock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Presents results from a survey of 450 new (1996-97) Ph.D. economists, providing information about employment, underemployment, employers, work activities, salaries, and job satisfaction. Comparisons are made across ranks of the graduates' Ph.D. programs, ...

The Changing Distributions of New Ph.D. Economists and Their Employment: Implications for the Future

By Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

This essay addressed the changing demographic composition of new Ph.D.s in economics and the changing distribution of the jobs that they are obtaining. It discusses how future trends may interact to influence the types of training that economists may prov...

It's Better Being an Economist (But Don't Tell Anyone).

By Richard B. Freeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

This paper contrasts the job market in economics with the job market in physics and mathematics, which attract students who are, by conventional measures, smarter than economists and where the base of knowledge is better established than ours. Despite thi...

The Link from Graduate Education in Economics to the Labor Market

By W. Lee Hansen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Against the background of the evidence presented by John Siegfried and Wendy Stock in this issue on labor market outcomes for new economics Ph.D. recipients, this paper discusses the links between the Ph.D. labor market and graduate education

Implications of the Labor Market for Graduate Education in Economics

By Anne O. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

The Siegfried-Stock findings represent the first solid data available since COGEE collected its data in the late 1980s. This paper reviews the COGEE findings in light of the new evidence. On the whole, the news is good: new Ph.D.s awarded are up, economic...

The Social Experiment Market

By David Greenberg, Mark Shroder, and Matthew Onstott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

In social experiments, individuals, households, or organizations are randomly assigned to two or more policy interventions. Elsewhere, we have summarized 143 experiments completed by autumn 1996. Here, we use the information we have gathered on these expe...

The Economics of Casino Gambling

By William R. Eadington

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

America's casino industry expanded rapidly in the 1990s, spreading from Nevada and Atlantic City to mining towns, riverboats, race tracks and tribal lands, and moving from isolated resort settings to urban and suburban venues. This article examines econom...

Policy Watch: The Marriage Penalty

By James Alm, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, and Leslie A. Whittington

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Many government programs have implicit penalties or subsidies for marriage. For example, many couples pay higher income taxes when married than their combined tax liabilities as single filers, while many other couples receive a marriage subsidy because th...

Data Watch: Research Data in the Economics of Education

By Thomas S. Dee, William N. Evans, and Sheila E. Murray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

One reason for the recent proliferation of empirical studies addressing the role of education in promoting individual and social welfare has been the emergence of high-quality, micro-level data on education. In this paper, we discuss three broad types of ...

Classroom Games: Rent-Seeking and the Inefficiency of Non-market Allocations

By Jacob K. Goeree and Charles A. Holt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Economics is often taught at a level of abstraction that can hinder some students from gaining basic intuition. However, lecture and textbook presentations can be complemented with classroom exercises in which students make decisions and interact. The app...