Epidemiology's Time of Need: COVID-19 Calls for Epidemic-Related Economics

[Symposium: Economics and Epidemiology]

By Eleanor J. Murray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted scientific conversations and scientific divisions into the public consciousness. Epidemiology and economics have long operated in distinct silos, but the COVID-19 pandemic presents a complex and cross-disciplinary prob...

A 30-Year Perspective on Property Derivatives: What Can Be Done to Tame Property Price Risk?

By Frank J. Fabozzi, Robert J. Shiller, and Radu S. Tunaru

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The housing sector is the largest spot market in the world without a developed derivative contract to serve the risk management needs of market participants. This paper describes the evolution within a wider economic context of property derivatives in the...

Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference

By Amy Finkelstein and Nathaniel Hendren

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

We describe a framework for empirical welfare analysis that uses the causal estimates of a policy's impact on net government spending. This framework provides guidance for which causal effects are (and are not) needed for empirical welfare analysis of pub...

The Persistent Effects of Initial Labor Market Conditions for Young Adults and Their Sources

By Till von Wachter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium- to long-term consequences. This paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career devel...

Retrospectives: Regulating Banks versus Managing Liquidity: Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton in 1802

By John Berdell and Thomas Mondschean

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

At nearly the same moment, Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton adopted diametrically opposed approaches to stabilizing the financial system. Henry Thornton eloquently defended the Bank of England's actions as the lender of last resort and saw its discreti...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Business Incomes at the Top

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Business income constitutes a large and increasing share of income and wealth at the top of the distribution. We discuss how tax policy treats and shapes how businesses are organized and how they distribute economic gains to owners, with the focus on clos...

The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies inequality in America through the lens of distributional macroeconomic accounts—comprehensive distributions of the aggregate amount of income and wealth recorded in the official macroeconomic accounts of the United States. We use th...

Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Florian Hoffmann, David S. Lee, and Thomas Lemieux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies the contribution of both labor and non-labor income in the growth in income inequality in the United States and large European economies. The paper first shows that the capital to labor income ratio disproportionately increased among ...

An Economist's Guide to Epidemiology Models of Infectious Disease

[Symposium: Economics and Epidemiology]

By Christopher Avery, William Bossert, Adam Clark, Glenn Ellison, and Sara Fisher Ellison

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

We describe the structure and use of epidemiology models of disease transmission, with an emphasis on the susceptible/infected/recovered (SIR) model. We discuss high-profile forecasts of cases and deaths that have been based on these models, what went wro...

Data Set Not Yet Available

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The not-so-hot melting pot

[Research Highlight]

November 05, 2020

How fast did economic disparities between immigrants to America converge in the Age of Mass Migration?

The Not-So-Hot Melting Pot: The Persistence of Outcomes for Descendants of the Age of Mass Migration

By Zachary Ward

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

How persistent are economic gaps across ethnicities? The convergence of ethnic gaps through the third generation of immigrants is difficult to measure because few datasets include grandparental birthplace. I overcome this limitation with a new three-gener...

The spoils system in Brazil

[Page]

How often do elected officials use hiring decisions as a patronage tool?

Call for Papers for Economic & Financial Modelling

[News]

November 10, 2020

Papers are invited on different aspects of economic and financial modelling.

How economists can help combat COVID-19

[Research Highlight]

November 03, 2020

Boston University epidemiologist Eleanor Murray says the tools of economics can help her field better understand the impacts of the disease.

Devotion and Development: Religiosity, Education, and Economic Progress in Nineteenth-Century France

By Mara P. Squicciarini

American Economic Review, November 2020

This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914). In this period, technology became skill-intens...

Demand Volatility, Adjustment Costs, and Productivity: An Examination of Capacity Utilization in Hotels and Airlines

By R. Andrew Butters

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

Measures of productivity reveal large differences across producers even within narrowly defined industries. Traditional measures of productivity, however, will associate differences in demand volatility to differences in productivity when adjusting factor...

Hidden Baggage: Behavioral Responses to Changes in Airline Ticket Tax Disclosure

By Sebastien Bradley and Naomi E. Feldman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

We examine the impact of a January 2012 enforcement action by the US Department of Transportation that required US air carriers and online travel agents to modify their web interfaces to incorporate all ticket taxes in up-front, advertised fares. We show ...