Imperfect Competition in the Interbank Market for Liquidity as a Rationale for Central Banking

By Viral V. Acharya, Denis Gromb, and Tanju Yorulmazer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

We study interbank lending and asset sales markets in which banks with surplus liquidity have market power vis-à-vis banks needing liquidity, frictions arise in lending due to moral hazard, and assets are bank-specific. Surplus banks ration lending...

The Pragmatist's Guide to Comparative Effectiveness Research

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By Amitabh Chandra, Anupam B. Jena, and Jonathan S. Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Following an acrimonious healthcare reform debate involving charges of "death panels," in 2010, Congress explicitly forbade the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in government programs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In this context, ...

The Evolution of Time Preference with Aggregate Uncertainty

By Arthur J. Robson and Larry Samuelson

American Economic Review, December 2009

We examine the evolutionary foundations of intertemporal preferences. When all the risk affecting survival and reproduction is idiosyncratic, evolution selects for agents who maximize the discounted sum of expected utility, discounting at the sum of th...

African American and White Differences in the Impacts of Monetary Policy on the Duration of Unemployment

By William M. Rodgers

American Economic Review, May 2008

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...

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...

Price Changes in the Euro Area and the United States: Some Facts from Individual Consumer Price Data

By Emmanuel Dhyne, Luis J. Alvarez, Herve Le Bihan, Giovanni Veronese, Daniel Dias, Johannes Hoffmann, Nicole Jonker, Patrick Lunnemann, Fabio Rumler, and Jouko Vilmunen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

Prices of goods and services do not adjust immediately in response to changing demand and supply conditions. This paper characterizes the average frequency and size of price changes in the euro area and its member countries, investigates the determinants ...

The Cost of Business Cycles Under Endogenous Growth

By Gadi Barlevy

American Economic Review, September 2004

Robert E. Lucas, Jr. argued that the welfare gains from reducing aggregate consumption volatility are negligible. Subsequent work that revisited his calculation continued to find small welfare benefits, further reinforcing the perception that business cyc...

Mortality Inequality: The Good News from a County-Level Approach

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this essay, we ask whether the distributions of life expectancy and mortality have become generally more unequal, as many seem to believe, and we report some good news. Focusing on groups of counties ranked by their poverty rates, we show that gains in...

Search-Theoretic Models of the Labor Market: A Survey

By Richard Rogerson, Robert Shimer, and Randall Wright

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2005

We survey the literature on search-theoretic models of the labor market. We show how this approach addresses many issues, including the following: Why do workers sometimes choose to remain unemployed? What determines the lengths of employment and unemploy...

What's in a Surname? The Effects of Surname Initials on Academic Success

By Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

In this paper, we focus on the effects of surname initials on professional outcomes in the academic labor market for economists. We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are...

The Q-Theory of Mergers

By Boyan Jovanovic and Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2002

Consumption, Income Changes, and Heterogeneity: Evidence from Two Fiscal Stimulus Programs

By Kanishka Misra and Paolo Surico

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

Almost half of American families did not adjust their consumption following receipt of the 2001 or 2008 tax rebates. Another 20 percent, with low income and more likely to rent, spent a small but significant amount. Households with large spending prope...

Evolutionary Selection of Individual Expectations and Aggregate Outcomes in Asset Pricing Experiments

By Mikhail Anufriev and Cars Hommes

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2012

In recent "learning to forecast" experiments (Hommes et al. 2005), three different patterns in aggregate price behavior have been observed: slow monotonic convergence, permanent oscillations, and dampened fluctuations. We show that a simple model of indiv...

Perspectives on The Rise and Fall of American Growth

By Robert J. Gordon

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper summarizes the book and assesses the reviews contained in the four contributed papers. Gregory Clark provides convincing arguments that extend the book's forecast that future technological change will be slower. Nicholas Crafts shows declining ...

The Rise and Fall of Disability Insurance Enrollment in the Netherlands

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By Pierre Koning and Maarten Lindeboom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

As recently as 15 years ago, the high level of Disability Insurance (DI) enrollment was considered to be one of the major social and economic problems of the Netherlands; indeed, the Netherlands was characterized as the country with the most out-of-contro...

Liquidity Traps and Jobless Recoveries

By Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martín Uribe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

This paper proposes a model that explains the joint occurrence of liquidity traps and jobless growth recoveries. Its key elements are downward nominal wage rigidity, a Taylor-type interest rate feedback rule, the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates...

Customary Norms, Inheritance, and Human Capital: Evidence from a Reform of the Matrilineal System in Ghana

By Eliana La Ferrara and Annamaria Milazzo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

We study the role of traditional norms in land allocation and human capital investment. We exploit a policy experiment in Ghana that increased the land that children from matrilineal groups could inherit from their fathers. Boys exposed to the reform rece...

The Market for Blood

By Robert Slonim, Carmen Wang, and Ellen Garbarino

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Donating blood, "the gift of life," is among the noblest activities and it is performed worldwide nearly 100 million times annually. The economic perspective presented here shows how the gift of life, albeit noble and often motivated by altruism, is heavi...

Expectations and Perceptions in Developing Countries: Their Measurement and Their Use

By Orazio P. Attanasio

American Economic Review, May 2009