Inside the Black Box: The Credit Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Ben S. Bernanke and Mark Gertler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight-money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and externa...

Monetary, Credit and (Other) Transmission Processes: A Monetarist Perspective

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Allan H. Meltzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Monetarist analysis of the transmission process highlights the response of relative prices and real wealth to monetary (and other) impulses. Monetary impulses are neutral in the long run. Short-run nonneutrality reflects uncertainty, incomplete informatio...

The Mirage of Fixed Exchange Rates

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets. Contrary to popular wisdom, industrialized-country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange paritie...

Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship

[Symposium: Might Environmental Regulation Promote Growth?]

By Michael E. Porter and Claas van der Linde

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Accepting a fixed trade-off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress. Studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts, ignor...

Tightening Environmental Standards: The Benefit-Cost or the No-Cost Paradigm?

[Symposium: Might Environmental Regulation Promote Growth?]

By Karen Palmer, Wallace E. Oates, and Paul R. Portney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This paper takes issue with the Porter-van der Linde claim that traditional benefit-cost analysis is a fundamental misrepresentation of the environmental problem. They contend that stringent environmental measures induce innovative efforts leading to impr...

Human Capital vs. Signalling Explanations of Wages

By Andrew Weiss

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

The key difference between signalling and human capital models is that signalling models allow firms to draw inferences about unobserved characteristics of workers. Those inferences can be based on the schooling or work experience of workers, or on direct...

Islamic Economics and the Islamic Subeconomy

By Timur Kuran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Although Islamic economics was developed to serve cultural and political ends, efforts have been made to put its ideals into practice. There now exist Islamic banks, which claim to offer an interest-free alternative to conventional banking, and government...

The Economic Case against Drug Prohibition

By Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This paper discusses the costs and benefits of drug prohibition. It offers a detailed outline of the economic consequences of drug prohibition and a systematic analysis of the relevant empirical evidence. The bottom line is that a relatively free market i...

Women in the Economics Profession

By Shulamit B. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This article discusses evidence from recent literature on gender literature on gender differences among Ph.D. economists. It finds many gender similarities in accomplishments, including undergraduate grades, publication rates (ceteris paribus), and labor ...

Retrospectives: The Convergence Debate between David Hume and Josiah Tucker

By Bruce Truitt Elmslie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

One of the most interesting debates in modern economics centers around the question of whether integrating economies necessarily converge in terms of per capita income and technology. This debate is often believed to have been started by Thorstein Veblen ...

The Flypaper Effect

By James R. Hines and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

What happens to a state's spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government? The standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes-...

Recommendations for Further Reading

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Correspondence

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Index by Author to Volume 9

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

The Historical Fertility Transition: A Guide for Economists

By Timothy W. Guinnane

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North America went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is central to recent accounts of long-run economic growth. P...

The Causal Effect of Parents' Schooling on Children's Schooling: A Comparison of Estimation Methods

By Helena Holmlund, Mikael Lindahl, and Erik Plug

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

We review the empirical literature that estimates the causal effect of parent's schooling on child's schooling, and conclude that estimates differ across studies. We then consider three explanations for why this is: (a) idiosyncratic differences in data s...

Exchange Rate Regimes in the Modern Era: Fixed, Floating, and Flaky

By Andrew K. Rose

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

This paper provides a selective survey of the incidence, causes, and consequences of a country's choice of its exchange rate regime. I begin with a critical review of Michael Klein and Jay C. Shambaugh's (2010) book Exchange Rate Regimes in the Modern Era...