Incidental Bequests and the Choice to Self-Insure Late-Life Risks

By Lee M. Lockwood

American Economic Review, September 2018

Despite facing significant uncertainty about their lifespans and health care costs, most retirees do not buy annuities or long-term care insurance. In this paper, I find that retirees' saving and insurance choices are highly inconsistent with standard lif...

Fiscal Foundations of Inflation: Imperfect Knowledge

By Stefano Eusepi and Bruce Preston

American Economic Review, September 2018

This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. Because imperfect knowledge breaks Ricardian equivalence, the scale and composition of the public debt matter for inflation. High and moderate d...

Asset Bubbles and Credit Constraints

By Jianjun Miao and Pengfei Wang

American Economic Review, September 2018

We provide a theory of rational stock price bubbles in production economies with infinitely lived agents. Firms meet stochastic investment opportunities and face endogenous credit constraints. They are not fully committed to repaying debt. Credit constrai...

International Reserves and Rollover Risk

By Javier Bianchi, Juan Carlos Hatchondo, and Leonardo Martinez

American Economic Review, September 2018

We study the optimal accumulation of international reserves in a quantitative model of sovereign default with long-term debt and a risk-free asset. Keeping higher levels of reserves provides a hedge against rollover risk, but this is costly because using ...

How Do Firms Form Their Expectations? New Survey Evidence

By Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Saten Kumar

American Economic Review, September 2018

We survey New Zealand firms and document novel facts about their macroeconomic beliefs. There is widespread dispersion in beliefs about past and future macroeconomic conditions, especially inflation. This dispersion in beliefs is consistent with firms' in...

In Search of Labor Demand

By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben M. Sand

American Economic Review, September 2018

We propose and estimate a novel specification of labor demand which encompasses search frictions and the role of entrepreneurs in new firm creation. Using city-industry variation over four decades, we estimate the wage elasticity of employment demand to b...

A Price Theory of Multi-sided Platforms: Comment

By Hongru Tan and Julian Wright

American Economic Review, September 2018

Weyl (2010) shows that in multi-sided platform settings, profit maximization leads to classical and Spence distortions, with the Spence distortion providing a new explanation for why prices may sometimes be too high (or too low) on platforms. However, the...

A Price Theory of Multi-sided Platforms: Reply

By E. Glen Weyl

American Economic Review, September 2018

I appreciate the clarification of my work by Tan and Wright, regret the confusing way my equations were labeled and intended them to be interpreted in the manner they suggest is correct.

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

Experimental Research on Labor Market Discrimination

By David Neumark

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

Understanding whether labor market discrimination explains inferior labor market outcomes for many groups has drawn the attention of labor economists for decades—at least since the publication of Gary Becker's The Economics of Discrimination in 1957...

Production and Welfare: Progress in Economic Measurement

By Dale W. Jorgenson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

While the GDP was intended by its originators as a measure of production, the absence of a measure of welfare in the national accounts has led to widespread misuse of the GDP to proxy welfare. Measures of welfare are needed to appraise the outcomes of cha...

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research

By Garret Christensen and Edward Miguel

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

There is growing interest in enhancing research transparency and reproducibility in economics and other scientific fields. We survey existing work on these topics within economics, and discuss the evidence suggesting that publication bias, inability to re...

Offshoring and Labor Markets

By David Hummels, Jakob R. Munch, and Chong Xiang

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

In this paper we survey the recent empirical literature on the effects of offshoring on wage, employment and displacement. We start with an overview of the measurement of offshoring, organizing our discussion around the three key elements of offshoring: t...

Optimal Income Taxation Theory and Principles of Fairness

By Marc Fleurbaey and François Maniquet

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

The achievements and limitations of the classical theory of optimal labor-income taxation based on social welfare functions are now well known. Even though utilitarianism still dominates public economics, recent interest has arisen for broadening the norm...

Mind the Gap: A Review of The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Sir Michael Marmot

By Adriana Lleras-Muney

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

The Health Gap documents the large and persistent health gaps that exist across and within relatively rich countries today. Marmot argues that in developed countries, poor health does not cause low incomes; rather, low socioeconomic status leads ...

The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King: A Review Essay

By Roger E. A. Farmer

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

I review The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King, published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2016. I discuss King's proposed regulatory reform, the "Pawn Broker for All Seasons" (PFAS), and I compare it to an alternative solution developed in my own work....

The Macrogenoeconomics of Comparative Development

By Quamrul H. Ashraf and Oded Galor

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

The importance of evolutionary forces for comparative economic performance across societies has been the focus of a vibrant literature, highlighting the roles played by the Neolithic Revolution as well as the prehistoric "out of Africa" migration of ana...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018