Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: What Central Bankers Could Learn from Academics--And Vice Versa

By Alan S. Blinder

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Academic writing about monetary policy has been useful to practical central bankers, but more of (certain aspects of) the economists' way of thinking could profitably be imported. On the other hand, academics could improve their analysis, and make it more...

Inequality, Income Growth, and Mobility: The Basic Facts

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By Peter Gottschalk

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

This essay brings together the factual material on changes in the distribution of labor market income that any of the theories addressed in the other papers in this symposium must address. The broad stylized facts are that the rapid growth and stable leve...

Changes in Earnings Inequality: The Role of Demand Shifts

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By George E. Johnson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

That the relative demand for labor in the upper segment of the skill distribution has been shifting is a widely accepted 'stylized fact' in the literature on the increase in earnings inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s. Explanations of the c...

Factor Proportions and Relative Wages: The Supply-Side Determinants of Wage Inequality

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By Robert H. Topel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Supply-side factors may contribute to rising wage inequality. First, certain changes in the supply of skills allegedly exacerbate wage inequality. Women's increased labor force participation and increased immigration are the leading candidates; both alleg...

Institutional Changes and Rising Wage Inequality: Is There a Linkage?

[Symposium: Wage Inequality]

By Nicole M. Fortin and Thomas Lemieux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

In this paper, the authors analyze the role of three institutional changes--the decline in the real value of the minimum wage, deunionization, and economic deregulation--on the rise in wage inequality in the United States during the 1980s. They argue that...

Inflation Targeting: A New Framework for Monetary Policy?

By Ben S. Bernanke and Frederic S. Mishkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

In recent years, a number of industrialized countries have adopted a strategy for monetary policy known as 'inflation targeting.' The authors describe how this approach has been implemented in practice and argue that it is best understood as a broad frame...

The Growth of Temporary Services Work

By Lewis M. Segal and Daniel G. Sullivan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Temporary services employment grew rapidly over the past several decades and now accounts for a sizable fraction of aggregate employment. The authors use Current Population Survey data to examine the changing nature of temporary work and discuss explanati...

The Perseverance of Paul Samuelson's Economics

By Mark Skousen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

A reflection of the economics profession through Paul Samuelson's Economics. Samuelson offers an uneasy mix of laissez faire in micro and government interventionism in macro. In earlier editions, Keynesian thinking dominated, with an antisaving, progovern...

Credo of a Lucky Textbook Author

By Paul A. Samuelson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

At war's end, introductory economics textbooks were overdue for a revolutionary advance. Change conspired to tempt the author to bring to the beginning course the rudiments of Keynesian macroeconomics. The impact was explosive. In reaction to criticisms o...

In Honor of David Card: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Richard B. Freeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

This paper describes the contribution of David Card, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, to economics and the new empiricism that has become such an important part of the profession. Card's forte is creative and careful empirical scholarship that exploi...

Recommendations for Further Reading

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Correspondence

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Divergence, Big Time

[Symposium: Distribution of World Income]

By Lant Pritchett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

Historical data are unnecessary to demonstrate that perhaps the basic fact of modern economic history is massive absolute divergence in per capita income across countries. A plausible lower bound on per capita income can be combined with estimates of its ...

On the Evolution of the World Income Distribution

[Symposium: Distribution of World Income]

By Charles I. Jones

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

The post-World War I period has seen substantial changes in the world income distribution. As a result, the shape of the distribution has changed from something that looks like a normal distribution in 1960 to a bimodal 'twin peaks' distribution in 1988. ...

Labor Market Rigidities: At the Root of Unemployment in Europe

[Symposium: European Unemployment]

By Horst Siebert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

This paper studies the major institutional changes at the root of the increase in the west European unemployment trade in the last quarter century from below 3 percent to 11 percent. The institutional characteristics of wage bargaining and the legal rules...

Unemployment and Labor Market Rigidities: Europe versus North America

[Symposium: European Unemployment]

By Stephen Nickell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

The received wisdom tells us that the rigidity and inflexibility of European job markets relative to that in the United States is the reason why Europe has high unemployment. This paper argues that this broad brush analysis is simply too vague to be usefu...