Trade Liberalization and Mortality: Evidence from US Counties

By Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

We investigate the impact of a large and persistent economic shock on "deaths of despair." We find that areas more exposed to a plausibly exogenous change in international trade policy exhibit relative increases in fatal drug overdoses, specifically among...

The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World?

By Yuyu Chen and David Y. Yang

American Economic Review, June 2019

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China to measure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored internet. We track subjects' media consumption, beliefs regarding the media, econom...

Minding Your Ps and Qs: Going from Micro to Macro in Measuring Prices and Quantities

By Gabriel Ehrlich, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, David Johnson, and Matthew D. Shapiro

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Key macro indicators such as output, productivity, and inflation are based on a complex system across multiple statistical agencies using different samples and levels of aggregation. The Census Bureau collects nominal sales, the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

What Can Machines Learn, and What Does It Mean for Occupations and the Economy?

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Tom Mitchell, and Daniel Rock

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Advances in machine learning (ML) are poised to transform numerous occupations and industries. This raises the question of which tasks will be most affected by ML. We apply the rubric evaluating task potential for ML in Brynjolfsson and Mitchell (2017) to...

Contractual Managerial Incentives with Stock Price Feedback

By Tse-Chun Lin, Qi Liu, and Bo Sun

American Economic Review, July 2019

We study the effect of financial market frictions on managerial compensation. We embed a market microstructure model into an otherwise standard contracting framework, and analyze optimal pay-for-performance when managers use information they learn from th...

Early Voting Laws, Voter Turnout, and Partisan Vote Composition: Evidence from Ohio

By Ethan Kaplan and Haishan Yuan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We estimate effects of early voting on voter turnout using a 2010 homogenization law from Ohio that forced some counties to expand and others to contract early voting. Using voter registration data, we compare individuals who live within the same 2x2 mile...

Do Free Trade Agreements Affect Tariffs of Nonmember Countries? A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

By Kamal Saggi, Andrey Stoyanov, and Halis Murat Yildiz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

We investigate the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on tariffs of non-member countries. In our multi-country model, the formation of an FTA leads members to reduce their exports to the rest of the world. Such external trade diversion weakens the ab...

Consumer Imperfect Information and Endogenous Price Rigidity

By Jean-Paul L'Huillier

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

This paper studies the propagation of monetary shocks in an economy featuring a strategic microfoundation for price rigidities. Following an aggregate shock to money, most consumers are initially uninformed. The market for goods is decentralized. Firms ar...

Retrospectives: Lord Keynes and Mr. Say: A Proximity of Ideas

By Alain Béraud and Guy Numa

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Since the publication of Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, generations of economists have been led to believe that Say was Keynes's ultimate nemesis. By means of textual and contextual analysis, we show that Keynes and Say held ...

Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, o...

What Happened: Financial Factors in the Great Recession

[Symposium: Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession]

By Mark Gertler and Simon Gilchrist

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

At the onset of the recent global financial crisis, the workhorse macroeconomic models assumed frictionless financial markets. These frameworks were thus not able to anticipate the crisis, nor to analyze how the disruption of credit markets changed what i...

Reducing Child Mortality in the Last Mile: Experimental Evidence on Community Health Promoters in Uganda

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Andrea Guariso, Jakob Svensson, and David Yanagizawa-Drott

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

The delivery of basic health products and services remains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mortality is high. This paper shows the results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of a novel approach to health care delivery. In randomly sel...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

How Prevalent Is Downward Rigidity in Nominal Wages? International Evidence from Payroll Records and Pay Slips

By Michael W. L. Elsby and Gary Solon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. Contrary evidence from household surveys reasonably has been discounted on the grounds that the measurement of frequen...

Gender Bias and Temporal Effects in Standard Evaluations of Teaching

By Whitney Buser, Jill Hayter, and Emily C. Marshall

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This study investigates whether gender differences in SET vary over the course of a semester, particularly in response to feedback from the instructor. We survey principles of economics courses at multiple institutions three times during the semester to a...

Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?

By Peter Harasztosi and Attila Lindner

American Economic Review, August 2019

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the margins along which firms responded to a large and persistent minimum wage increase in Hungary. We show that employment elasticities are negative but small even four years after the reform; that around...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Using JEP Articles as Course Readings? Tell Us About It!

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Casting a Wider Tax Net: Experimental Evidence from Costa Rica

By Anne Brockmeyer, Spencer Smith, Marco Hernandez, and Stewart Kettle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

The majority of firms in developing countries are informal, yet even among registered firms, tax filing rates are low. We argue that non-filing of taxes among registered firms constitutes an important intermediate form of informality, which can be tackled...

Are Price-Cost Markups Rising in the United States? A Discussion of the Evidence

[Symposium: Markups]

By Susanto Basu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypo...