Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Thirteen Thousand Resumes

By Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

Thousands of randomly manipulated resumes were sent in response to online job postings in Toronto to investigate why immigrants, allowed in based on skill, struggle in the labor market. The study finds substantial discrimination across a variety of occupa...

Just Keep My Money! Supporting Tax-Time Savings with US Savings Bonds

By Peter Tufano

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

This paper reports the results of a 2007 experiment testing whether specific process simplification can foster increased take-up rates for savings products, particularly by low-to-moderate income (LMI) households. Tax refund recipients at certain H&R Bloc...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Neuroeconomic Foundations of Economic Choice--Recent Advances

[Symposium: Neuroeconomics]

By Ernst Fehr and Antonio Rangel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Neuroeconomics combines methods and theories from neuroscience psychology, economics, and computer science in an effort to produce detailed computational and neurobiological accounts of the decision-making process that can serve as a common foundation for...

It's about Space, It's about Time, Neuroeconomics and the Brain Sublime

[Symposium: Neuroeconomics]

By Marieke van Rooij and Guy Van Orden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Neuroeconomics has investigated which regions of the brain are associated with the factors contributing to economic decision making, emphasizing the position in space of brain areas associated with the factors of decision making—cognitive or emotive...

Molecular Genetics and Economics

[Symposium: Genetics and Economics]

By Jonathan P. Beauchamp, David Cesarini, Magnus Johannesson, Matthijs J. H. M. van der Loos, Philipp D. Koellinger, Patrick J. F. Groenen, James H. Fowler, J. Niels Rosenquist, A. Roy Thurik, and Nicholas A. Christakis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

The costs of comprehensively genotyping human subjects have fallen to the point where major funding bodies, even in the social sciences, are beginning to incorporate genetic and biological markers into major social surveys. How, if at all, should economis...

Genes, Eyeglasses, and Social Policy

[Symposium: Genetics and Economics]

By Charles F. Manski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Someone reading empirical research relating human genetics to personal outcomes must be careful to distinguish two types of work: An old literature on heritability attempts to decompose cross-sectional variation in observed outcomes into unobservable gene...

The Composition and Drawdown of Wealth in Retirement

[Symposium: After Retirement]

By James Poterba, Steven Venti, and David Wise

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

This paper presents evidence on the resources available to households as they enter retirement. It draws heavily on data collected by the Health and Retirement Study. We calculate the "potential additional annuity income" that households could purchase, g...

Insuring Long-Term Care in the United States

[Symposium: After Retirement]

By Jeffrey R. Brown and Amy Finkelstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Long-term care expenditures constitute one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly in the United States and thus play a central role in determining the retirement security of elderly Americans. In this essay, we begin by providing some...

Annuitization Puzzles

[Symposium: After Retirement]

By Shlomo Benartzi, Alessandro Previtero, and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech given in 1985, Franco Modigliani drew attention to the "annuitization puzzle": that annuity contracts, other than pensions through group insurance, are extremely rare. Rational choice theory predicts that households w...

The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations

By Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

This paper presents the case for tax progressivity based on recent results in optimal tax theory. We consider the optimal progressivity of earnings taxation and whether capital income should be taxed. We critically discuss the academic research on these t...

When and Why Incentives (Don't) Work to Modify Behavior

By Uri Gneezy, Stephan Meier, and Pedro Rey-Biel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

First we discuss how extrinsic incentives may come into conflict with other motivations. For example, monetary incentives from principals may change how tasks are perceived by agents, with negative effects on behavior. In other cases, incentives might hav...

Retrospectives: X-Efficiency

By Michael Perelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

In a 1966 article in the American Economic Review, Harvey Leibenstein introduced the concept of "X-efficiency": the gap between ideal allocative efficiency and actually existing efficiency. Leibenstein insisted that absent strong competitive pre...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2011

Frictional Wage Dispersion in Search Models: A Quantitative Assessment

By Andreas Hornstein, Per Krusell, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, December 2011

We propose a new measure of frictional wage dispersion: the mean-min wage ratio. For a large class of search models, we show that this measure is independent of the wage-offer distribution but depends on statistics of labor-market turnover and on preferen...

Search and Satisficing

By Andrew Caplin, Mark Dean, and Daniel Martin

American Economic Review, December 2011

Many everyday decisions are made without full examination of all available options, and, as a result, the best available option may be missed. We develop a search-theoretic choice experiment to study the impact of incomplete consideration on the quality o...

Sources of Lifetime Inequality

By Mark Huggett, Gustavo Ventura, and Amir Yaron

American Economic Review, December 2011

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimate...

Endogenous Information Flows and the Clustering of Announcements

By Viral V. Acharya, Peter DeMarzo, and Ilan Kremer

American Economic Review, December 2011

We consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model. Because investors don't know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the imm...