Compensation for State and Local Government Workers

By Maury Gittleman and Brooks Pierce

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Are state and local government workers overcompensated? In this paper, we step back from the highly charged rhetoric and address this question with the two primary data sources for looking at compensation of state and local government workers: the Current...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

The Elasticity of Taxable Income with Respect to Marginal Tax Rates: A Critical Review

By Emmanuel Saez, Joel Slemrod, and Seth H. Giertz

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

This paper critically surveys the large and growing literature estimating the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates using tax return data. First, we provide a theoretical framework showing under what assumptions this elasticity c...

Economic Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility

By Markus Kitzmueller and Jay Shimshack

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

This paper synthesizes the expanding corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. We define CSR from an economic perspective and develop a CSR taxonomy that connects disparate approaches to the subject. We explore whether CSR should exist and investi...

The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850: Review Essay

By Gregory Clark

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

The British Industrial Revolution is the key break in world history. Yet the timing, location, and cause of this Revolution are unsolved puzzles. Joel Mokyr's book is one of a number of recent attempted solutions. He explains the Industrial Revolution thr...

Economic History or History of Economics? Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius: Review Essay

By Orley Ashenfelter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

In this essay, I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in ...

Fighting Poverty One Experiment at a Time: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty: Review Essay

By Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo offer a coherent vision for an economics of poverty and antipoverty policy. Their economics is grounded in an effort to understand the economic and psychological complexities in the lives of poor people, informed by socia...

Thinking Small: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty: Review Essay

By Mark R. Rosenzweig

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

In Poor Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo eschew grand theorizing about poverty reduction in favor of an approach in which intelligently designed and tested small interventions, based on a scientific understanding of the lives of the p...

Getting Up to Speed on the Financial Crisis: A One-Weekend-Reader's Guide

By Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

All economists should be conversant with "what happened?" during the financial crisis of 2007-09. We select and summarize sixteen documents, including academic papers and reports from regulatory and international agencies. This reading list covers the ke...

Reading about the Financial Crisis: A Twenty-One-Book Review

By Andrew W. Lo

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of twenty-one books on the crisis, eleven written by academics, and ten written by journalists and one former Treasury Sec...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

Are the Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks Big or Small?

By Olivier Coibion

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

This paper studies the small estimated effects of monetary policy shocks from standard VARs versus the large effects from the Romer and Romer (2004) approach. The differences are driven by three factors: the different contractionary impetus, the period of...

Political Pressures on Monetary Policy during the US Great Inflation

By Charles L. Weise

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

Drawing on an analysis of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) documents, this paper argues that political pressures on the Federal Reserve were an important contributor to the rise in inflation in the United States in the 1970s. Members of the FOMC under...

Learning in a Medium-Scale DSGE Model with Expectations Based on Small Forecasting Models

By Sergey Slobodyan and Raf Wouters

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

This paper evaluates the empirical performance of a medium-scale DSGE model with agents forming expectations using small forecasting models updated by the Kalman filter. The adaptive learning model fits the data better than the rational expectations (RE) ...

Capital Market Integration and Wages

By Anusha Chari, Peter Blair Henry, and Diego Sasson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

For three years after the typical emerging economy opens its stock market to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of three. No such increase occurs in a control group...