How Far Has the Transition Progressed?

[Symposium: Transition from Socialism]

By Peter Murrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

As the opening contribution to a four-page symposium, this paper provides an overview of the economic transformation in reforming countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, describing reforms, their consequences, and lessons economists might...

Stabilization and Growth in Transition Economies: The Early Experience

[Symposium: Transition from Socialism]

By Stanley Fischer, Ratna Sahay, and Carlos A. Vegh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

The authors analyze the growth and stabilization experience in twenty-six transition economies in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Mongolia for the period 1989-94. Inflation rates have declined significantly in most countries following an infl...

Privatization Is Transition--Or Is It?

[Symposium: Transition from Socialism]

By Josef C. Brada

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Various means of creating a private sector have been used in transition economies, including restitution, privatization of state firms through sales or voucher schemes, and start-ups of new private firms. The privatization of state-owned firms raises ques...

The Roles of the State and the Market in Establishing Property Rights

[Symposium: Transition from Socialism]

By Andrzej Rapaczynski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Using the experiences of Eastern Europe as an example, this article argues that, contrary to the economists' assumption that property rights are a precondition of a market economy, market institutions are often a prerequisite for a viable private property...

The Economics of Convention

By H. Peyton Young

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

The purpose of conventions is to coordinate people's expectations in economic and social interactions that have multiple equilibria. Conventions often emerge endogenously from the accumulation of many precedents, a process that can be modeled as a stochas...

Inflows of Capital to Developing Countries in the 1990s

By Guillermo A. Calvo, Leonardo Leiderman, and Carmen M. Reinhart

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Half a decade has passed since the resurgence of international capital flows to many developing countries and history has, once again, shown that foreign investment is prone to repeated booms and busts. Mexico's 1994 crisis is but a recent example that hi...

Discovering Diversity in Introductory Economics

By Robin L. Bartlett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Instructors can begin the process of integrating race and gender issues into introductory economics by reexamining their courses with a new lens of diversity. The content of introductory economics can be expanded by 'adding and stirring' race and gender d...

Data Watch: The Panel Study of Income Dynamics

By Charles Brown, Greg J. Duncan, and Frank P. Stafford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

By collecting annual economic and demographic information from a large and representative sample of U.S. households for over a quarter century, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics has compiled a remarkably useful set of microdata. This article describes th...

Retrospectives: The Origins of the Representative Agent

By James E. Hartley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

This paper examines Alfred Marshall's invention of the representative firm. Marshall first used the representative firm in order to describe an industry supply curve for an industry with heterogeneous firms. Despite Marshall's limited use of the notion, t...

Classroom Games: Understanding Bayes' Rule

By Charles A. Holt and Lisa R. Anderson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

This paper uses the technique of experimental economics to set up a classroom situation where students learn to make Bayesian decisions. The exercises allow students to discover for themselves a natural counting heuristic that corresponds to Bayes's rule ...

Policy Watch: The Food Stamp Program and Welfare Reform

By Betsey A. Kuhn, Pamela Allen Dunn, David Smallwood, Kenneth Hanson, Jim Blaylock, and Stephen Vogel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Major changes have been proposed for the Food Stamp Program, including replacing the program with block grants to the states, cashing out the benefits, and reducing program funding from baseline levels. This paper will explore the impacts of food stamp re...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Recommendations for Further Reading

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Correspondence

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

A Successful Accident: Recollections and Speculations about the CEA

[Symposium: Fifty Years of the Council of Economic Advisers]

By Herbert Stein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

As originally conceived, the President's Council of Economic Advisers would have a unique relation with the president, using Keynesian analysis to advise him on maintaining full employment. After fifty years, the Council has evolved into being a useful co...

The CEA: An Inside Voice for Mainstream Economics

[Symposium: Fifty Years of the Council of Economic Advisers]

By Charles L. Schultze

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

After initially concentrating on macroeconomic policy, the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) soon began to provide the president with advice on virtually all issues with economic content. On a wide range of issues there has been a commonality of advice g...

Keynesianism, Pennsylvania Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the Employment Act of 1946

[Symposium: Fifty Years of the Council of Economic Advisers]

By J. Bradford De Long

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

The Employment Act of 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)--and served as a convenient marker of the government's acceptance of the burden of stabilizing the macroeconomy. The willingness of post-WWII governments to let automatic stabilizer...

Different Approaches for Dealing with Social Security

[Symposium: Social security]

By Edward M. Gramlich

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

This paper discusses the report of the 1994 Quadrennial Advisory Council on Social Security, of which the author was chair. The system is out of long-term actuarial balance and, as a maturing defined benefit pay-as-you-go system, is giving younger cohorts...

Proposals to Restructure Social Security

[Symposium: Social security]

By Peter A. Diamond

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

This paper discusses five proposed changes in Social Security: indexing the normal retirement age to life expectancy (as Sweden is doing); investing part of the trust funds in private securities; partial privatization (as has been proposed by Senators Ker...