A Year of Living Dangerously: The Management of the Financial Crisis in 2008

[Symposium: Financial Regulation after the Crisis]

By Vincent Reinhart

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

There are many reasons to regret the decision of U.S. financial authorities to insert the government into the resolution of the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008. The Federal Reserve's use of its discount window built up false hope of future resc...

Consumer Financial Protection

[Symposium: Financial Regulation after the Crisis]

By John Y. Campbell, Howell E. Jackson, Brigitte C. Madrian, and Peter Tufano

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

The recent financial crisis has led many to question how well businesses deliver services and how well regulatory institutions address problems in consumer financial markets. This paper discusses consumer financial regulation, emphasizing the full range o...

Selection in Insurance Markets: Theory and Empirics in Pictures

By Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Government intervention in insurance markets is ubiquitous and the theoretical basis for such intervention, based on classic work from the 1970s, has been the problem of adverse selection. Over the last decade, empirical work on selection in insurance mar...

Who Pays for Obesity?

By Jay Bhattacharya and Neeraj Sood

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Adult obesity is a growing problem. From 1962 to 2006, obesity prevalence nearly tripled to 35.1 percent of adults. The rising prevalence of obesity is not limited to a particular socioeconomic group and is not unique to the United States. Should this wid...

Priceless: The Nonpecuniary Benefits of Schooling

By Philip Oreopoulos and Kjell G. Salvanes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Increasing wealth provides key motivation for students to forgo earnings and struggle through exams. But, as we argue in this paper, schooling generates many experiences and affects many dimensions of skill that, in turn, affect central aspects of individ...

Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality-Incentives Trade-Off

By Ran Abramitzky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

The first kibbutz was established southwest of the Sea of Galilee in 1910, but the vast majority of kibbutzim were established in the 1930s and 1940s, shortly before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Founders aimed to create a "new human being"...

Behavior under Extreme Conditions: The Titanic Disaster

By Bruno S. Frey, David A. Savage, and Benno Torgler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

During the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg on her maiden voyage. Two hours and 40 minutes later she sank, resulting in the loss of 1,501 lives—more than two-thirds of her 2,207 passengers and crew. This remains one ...

Retrospectives: The Phillips Curve: A Rushed Job?

By A. G. Sleeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Half a century ago, Economica published what its webpage claims is "the most heavily cited macroeconomics title of the 20th century"—the paper by A. W. H. "Bill" Phillips (1958) that introduced the Phillips curve. Based on admittedly circum...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

Top Incomes in the Long Run of History

By Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

A recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics. Top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total ta...

Frontiers of Real-Time Data Analysis

By Dean Croushore

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

In the past ten years, researchers have explored the impact of data revisions in many different contexts. Researchers have examined the properties of data revisions, how structural modeling is affected by data revisions, how data revisions affect forecas...

Thinking about the Firm: A Review of Daniel Spulber's The Theory of the Firm

By Oliver Hart

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

In this review, I describe how economists have moved beyond the firm as a black box to incorporate incentives, internal organization, and firm boundaries. I then turn to the way that the theory of the firm is treated in Daniel Spulber's book The Theo...

The Squam Lake Report: Commentary

By Charles A. E. Goodhart

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

The idea of the Squam Lake Report was to bring together some fifteen leading U.S. financial economists to see what regulatory changes they could jointly agree and thereby influence policy discussions. Seeking to find a consensus, however, meant ...

Financial Regulation: Lessons from the Recent Financial Crises

By Takeo Hoshi

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

The experiences of the financial crises in the United States recently and in Japan in the 1990s suggest two lessons for future financial regulations. First, the lack of an orderly resolution mechanism for large and complex financial institutions created ...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

Links to individual book reviews now available online.

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2011