Is China Socialist?

[Symposium: China]

By Barry Naughton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

It has been 40 years since Deng Xiaoping broke dramatically with Maoist ideology and the Maoist variant of socialism. Since then, China has been transformed. Forty years ago, in 1978, China was unquestionably a socialist economy of the familiar and well-s...

Human Capital and China's Future Growth

[Symposium: China]

By Hongbin Li, Prashant Loyalka, Scott Rozelle, and Binzhen Wu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

In this paper, we consider the sources and prospects for economic growth in China with a focus on human capital. First, we provide an overview of the role that labor has played in China's economic success. We then describe China's hukou policy, w...

From "Made in China" to "Innovated in China": Necessity, Prospect, and Challenges

[Symposium: China]

By Shang-Jin Wei, Zhuan Xie, and Xiaobo Zhang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

After more than three decades of high growth based on its low-wage advantage and relatively favorable demographics--in combination with market-oriented reforms and openness to the world economy--China is at a crossroads with a much higher wage and a shr...

A New Era of Pollution Progress in Urban China?

[Symposium: China]

By Siqi Zheng and Matthew E. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

Over the last 30 years, China's economy has boomed. This trend has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty but it has also sharply increased local, regional, and global pollution levels. We look at the rise in air pollution over recent dec...

A Real Estate Boom with Chinese Characteristics

[Symposium: China]

By Edward Glaeser, Wei Huang, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

Chinese housing prices rose by over 10 percent per year in real terms between 2003 and 2014 and are now between two and ten times higher than the construction cost of apartments. At the same time, Chinese developers built 100 billion square feet of reside...

Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda

[Symposium: China]

By Bei Qin, David Strömberg, and Yanhui Wu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo--the most prominent Chinese microblogg...

The Evolution of China's One-Child Policy and Its Effects on Family Outcomes

[Symposium: China]

By Junsen Zhang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

In 1979, China introduced its unprecedented one-child policy, under which households exceeding the birth quota were penalized. However, estimating the effect of this policy on family outcomes turns out to be complicated. China had already enacted an agg...

The New Life Cycle of Women's Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middles, Expanding Tops

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Goldin and Joshua Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

A new life cycle of women's employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, life-cycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak, and then declined starting in the fifties. The new life cy...

Specialization Then and Now: Marriage, Children, and the Gender Earnings Gap across Cohorts

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Chinhui Juhn and Kristin McCue

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

In this paper, we examine the evolution of the gender gap associated with marriage and parental status, comparing cohorts born between 1936 and 1985. The model of household specialization and division of labor introduced by Becker posits that when forming...

The Economic Consequences of Family Policies: Lessons from a Century of Legislation in High-Income Countries

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fertility, and child development. Wh...

How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process

By Jonathan B. Berk, Campbell R. Harvey, and David Hirshleifer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

The review process for academic journals in economics has grown vastly more extensive over time. Journals demand more revisions, and papers have become bloated with numerous robustness checks and extensions. Even if the extra resulting revisions do on ave...

Retrospectives: Do Productive Recessions Show the Recuperative Powers of Capitalism? Schumpeter's Analysis of the Cleansing Effect

By Muriel Dal Pont Legrand and Harald Hagemann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

Schumpeter has often been interpreted as a "liquidationist," someone who is convinced that economic crises are necessary and unavoidable, and thus that government nonintervention is a sound policy in such crises. The first two sections of this paper dis...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2017

High Discounts and High Unemployment

By Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, February 2017

Unemployment is high when financial discounts are high. In recessions, the stock market falls and all types of investment fall, including employers' investment in job creation. The discount rate implicit in the stock market rises, and discounts for other ...

No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012

By Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger

American Economic Review, February 2017

How have house prices evolved over the long run? This paper presents annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. We show that real house prices stayed constant from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, but rose strongly and with subs...

In with the Big, Out with the Small: Removing Small-Scale Reservations in India

By Leslie A. Martin, Shanthi Nataraj, and Ann E. Harrison

American Economic Review, February 2017

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates jobs. We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60 years, SSI promotion in India focused on rese...

Price Cutting and Business Stealing in Imperfect Cartels

By B. Douglas Bernheim and Erik Madsen

American Economic Review, February 2017

Although economists have made substantial progress toward formulating theories of collusion in industrial cartels that account for a variety of fact patterns, important puzzles remain. Standard models of repeated interaction formalize the observation that...

Peer Effects in the Workplace

By Thomas Cornelissen, Christian Dustmann, and Uta Schönberg

American Economic Review, February 2017

Existing evidence on peer effects in the productivity of coworkers stems from either laboratory experiments or real-world studies referring to a specific firm or occupation. In this paper, we aim at providing more generalizable results by investigating a ...

Cultural Proximity and Loan Outcomes

By Raymond Fisman, Daniel Paravisini, and Vikrant Vig

American Economic Review, February 2017

We present evidence that cultural proximity (shared codes, beliefs, ethnicity) between lenders and borrowers increases the quantity of credit and reduces default. We identify in-group lending using dyadic data on religion and caste for officers and borrow...