The Surprising Incidence of Tax Credits for the Toyota Prius

By James M. Sallee

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

This paper estimates the incidence of tax incentives for the Toyota Prius. Transaction microdata indicate that both federal and state incentives were fully captured by consumers. This is surprising because Toyota faced a binding production constraint, whi...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

The (Paper)Work of Medicine: Understanding International Medical Costs

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By David M. Cutler and Dan P. Ly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

This paper draws on international evidence on medical spending to examine what the United States can learn about making its healthcare system more efficient. We focus primarily on understanding contemporaneous differences in the level of spending, general...

The Pragmatist's Guide to Comparative Effectiveness Research

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By Amitabh Chandra, Anupam B. Jena, and Jonathan S. Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Following an acrimonious healthcare reform debate involving charges of "death panels," in 2010, Congress explicitly forbade the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in government programs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In this context, ...

Patient Cost-Sharing and Healthcare Spending Growth

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By Katherine Baicker and Dana Goldman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

In this paper, we explore the role patient incentives play in slowing healthcare spending growth. Evidence suggests that while patients do indeed respond to financial incentives, cost-sharing does not uniformly improve value; rather, cost-sharing provisi...

Reforming Payments to Healthcare Providers: The Key to Slowing Healthcare Cost Growth While Improving Quality?

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By Mark McClellan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

This paper focuses on a broad movement toward a fundamentally different way of paying healthcare providers. The approach reaches beyond the old dichotomies about whether healthcare providers are reimbursed on a fee-for-service or a "capitated" or per-pers...

Evaluating the Medical Malpractice System and Options for Reform

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By Daniel P. Kessler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

The U.S. medical malpractice liability system has two principal objectives: to compensate patients who are injured through the negligence of healthcare providers and to deter providers from practicing negligently. In practice, however, the system is slow ...

Offshoring Bias in U.S. Manufacturing

By Susan Houseman, Christopher Kurz, Paul Lengermann, and Benjamin Mandel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

In this paper, we show that the substitution of imported for domestically produced goods and services—often known as offshoring—can lead to overestimates of U.S. productivity growth and value added. We explore how the measurement of productivi...

The Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Public Health

By Christopher Carpenter and Carlos Dobkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

The Amethyst Initiative, signed by more than 100 college presidents and other higher education officials calls for a reexamination of the minimum legal drinking age in the United States. A central argument of the initiative is that the U.S. minimum legal ...

The Market for Charitable Giving

By John A. List

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Through good and bad economic times, charitable gifts have continued to roll in largely unabated over the past half century. In a typical year, total charitable gifts of money now exceed 2 percent of gross domestic product. Moreover, charitable giving has...

Incomplete Contracts and the Theory of the Firm: What Have We Learned over the Past 25 Years?

By Philippe Aghion and Richard Holden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart used the theory of incomplete contracts to develop answers to the question "What is a firm, and what determines its boundaries?" in their path-breaking paper on "The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical ...

Retrospectives: Lionel W. McKenzie and the Proof of the Existence of a Competitive Equilibrium

By E. Roy Weintraub

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discov...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Considerations for Those Proposing Topics and Papers for JEP

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2011

Foreword

By Orley C. Ashenfelter

American Economic Review, May 2011

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Samantha Bennett

American Economic Review, May 2011

Inequality at Birth: Some Causes and Consequences

By Janet Currie

American Economic Review, May 2011

Recessions, Retirement, and Social Security

By Courtney C. Coile and Phillip B. Levine

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper examines how labor market fluctuations around the time of retirement affect the labor force status and Social Security receipt of individuals ages 55 to 69 and the income of retirees in their 70s, using data from the March Current Population Su...