Heat and Learning

By R. Jisung Park, Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, and Jonathan Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

We demonstrate that heat inhibits learning and that school air conditioning may mitigate this effect. Student fixed effects models using 10 million students who retook the PSATs show that hotter school days in the years before the test was taken reduce sc...

EconTrack

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How to cure a debt hangover

[Research Highlight]

May 01, 2020

Relieving delinquent borrowers requires more than just lower minimum payments.

Targeted Debt Relief and the Origins of Financial Distress: Experimental Evidence from Distressed Credit Card Borrowers

By Will Dobbie and Jae Song

American Economic Review, April 2020

We study the drivers of financial distress using a large-scale field experiment that offered randomly selected borrowers a combination of (i) immediate payment reductions to target short-run liquidity constraints and (ii) delayed interest write-downs to t...

A dearth of ideas

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It's taking more resources to keep up with the same pace of growth.

Shelly Lundberg, Distinguished Fellow 2020

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Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

Votes for Women: An Economic Perspective on Women's Enfranchisement

[Symposium: One Hundred Years of Women's Suffrage]

By Carolyn M. Moehling and Melissa A. Thomasson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history ...

A Century of the American Woman Voter: Sex Gaps in Political Participation, Preferences, and Partisanship since Women's Enfranchisement

[Symposium: One Hundred Years of Women's Suffrage]

By Elizabeth U. Cascio and Na'ama Shenhav

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

This year marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, which provided American women a constitutional guarantee to the franchise. We assemble data from a variety of sources to document and explore trends in women's political participation, issue pr...

Sociological Perspectives on Racial Discrimination

[Symposium: Perspectives on Racial Discrimination]

By Mario L. Small and Devah Pager

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

As in economics, racial discrimination has long been a focus of research in sociology. Yet the disciplines traditionally have differed in how they approach the topic. While some studies in recent years show signs of cross-disciplinary influence, exposin...

Race Discrimination: An Economic Perspective

[Symposium: Perspectives on Racial Discrimination]

By Kevin Lang and Ariella Kahn-Lang Spitzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

We review the empirical literature in economics on discrimination in the labor market and criminal justice system, focusing primarily on discrimination by race. We then discuss theoretical models of taste-based discrimination, particularly models of frict...

Evaluating State and Local Business Incentives

[Symposium: How Taxes Affect Location Choices]

By Cailin Slattery and Owen Zidar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

This essay describes and evaluates state and local business tax incentives in the United States. In 2014, states spent between 5 USD and 216 USD per capita on incentives for firms in the form of firm-specific subsidies and general tax credits, which mos...

Taxation and Migration: Evidence and Policy Implications

[Symposium: How Taxes Affect Location Choices]

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Mathilde Muñoz, and Stefanie Stantcheva

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effects of personal taxation on the geographic mobility of people and discuss its policy implications. We start by laying out the empirical challenges that prevented progress in this area ...

The Separation and Reunification of Germany: Rethinking a Natural Experiment Interpretation of the Enduring Effects of Communism

[Symposium: The Departure of Communism]

By Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, and Ludger Woessmann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West G...

The Long-Term Effects of Communism in Eastern Europe

[Symposium: The Departure of Communism]

By Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln and Matthias Schündeln

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

We analyze the long-term effects of communism on both policies and preferences in Eastern Europe in four areas in which the communist and capitalist doctrines fundamentally differ: government intervention in markets, political freedom, and inequality in i...

The Basic Economics of Internet Infrastructure

By Shane Greenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

The internet's structure and operations remain invisible to most economists. What determines the economic value of internet infrastructure and the incentives to improve it? What are the open research questions for the most salient policy issues? This arti...

The Economics of Tipping

By Ofer H. Azar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

Tipping involves dozens of billions of dollars annually in the US alone and is a major income source for millions of workers. But beyond its economic importance and various economic implications, tipping is also a unique economic phenomenon in that people...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

Rental housing, millenials, and Friedman

[News]

May 07, 2020

Reading recommendations from Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Dissecting monetary policy

[Research Highlight]

April 16, 2020

How much of the reaction to Fed policy is based on what officials say versus what they do?