Comments on the Market Crash: Six Months After

[Symposium: Brady Commission Report on the October 1987 Stock Market Crash]

By Hayne Leland and Mark Rubinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

Six months after the market crash of October 1987, we are still sifting through the debris searching for its cause. Two theories of the crash sound plausible -- one based on a market panic and the other based on large trader transactions -- though there i...

Lessons on Monetary Policy from the 1980s

[Symposium: Monetary Lessons of the 1980s]

By Benjamin M. Friedman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

The half-decade running from mid-1982 to mid-1987 was a pretty good era for U.S. monetary policy, as these things go. Even the severe 1981-82 recession served its intended purpose of substantially restoring price stability. At least as judged by the outco...

Monetary Policy Lessons of Recent Inflation and Disinflation

[Symposium: Monetary Lessons of the 1980s]

By William Poole

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

I will consider the monetary policy lessons of the recent inflation and disinflation. The next section of this paper is devoted to the decline of M1 velocity after 1981 and the demise of the "standard" money demand function. Some authors conclude that thi...

Illegal Immigration and Immigration Control

[Symposium: Immigration]

By Barry R. Chiswick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed in the closing days of the 1986 legislative session. The primary purpose of IRCA is to remove illegal aliens from the U.S. labor market. It has two primary policy instruments. One is granting legal ...

The Political Economy of Immigration Law: Impact of Simpson-Rodino on the United States and Mexico

[Symposium: Immigration]

By Clark W. Reynolds and Robert K. McCleery

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

About two years ago the United States passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, also called the "Simpson-Rodino" bill of 1986. The Act called for increased enforcement of migration policy, employer sanctions, and amnesty for those who could prove con...

Minimum Wage Laws: Are They Overrated?

By Charles Brown

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

I think there is a reasonably high degree of agreement in studies of the impact of the minimum wage on employment, unemployment, and the distribution of income -- though I will also point to a few areas where further work could refine our understanding of...

Variable Trends in Economic Time Series

By James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

The two most striking historical features of aggregate output are its sustained long run growth and its recurrent fluctuations around this growth path. Over horizons of a few years, these shorter cyclical swings can be pronounced; for example, the 1953, 1...

Puzzles: Sylvia, Ice Cream and More

By Joseph Farrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

This installment of Puzzles includes answers to all the puzzles presented. The puzzles are titled: "Competition as a Welfare Minimum"; "Externalities Galore"; "The Utility of Ice Cream"; "Congestion Pricing"; and "Are There Pareto Improvements?"

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

Anomalies: Cooperation

By Robyn M. Dawes and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

Much economic analysis -- and virtually all game theory -- starts with the assumption that people are both rational and selfish. The predictions derived from this assumption of rational selfishness are, however, violated in many familiar contexts. In this...

Correspondence

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Symposium on the Slowdown in Productivity Growth

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Stanley Fischer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

The growth slowdown that began in the late 1960s or early 1970s is the most significant macroeconomic development of the last two decades. The four papers in this symposium address the question of the causes of the growth slowdown and, to a lesser extent,...

Productivity Puzzles and R&D: Another Nonexplanation

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Zvi Griliches

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Around 1974-75, output growth and associated productivity measures dropped sharply in the United States and in most other western industrialized nations and continued at rather low rates for most of the rest of the 1970s. During the late 1960s, the growth...

Productivity and Postwar U.S. Economic Growth

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Dale W. Jorgenson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the sources of postwar U.S. economic growth. The findings presented here allocate more than three-fourths of U.S. economic growth during the period 1948-1979 to growth of capital and labor inputs and less than one-f...

The Productivity Slowdown, the Oil Shocks, and the Real Cycle

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Mancur Olson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Five facts stand out about economic performance in the United States since World War II. The first is that, for most of the postwar period, the U.S. has had a slower rate of economic growth than the other major developed democracies except Great Britain, ...

Tax Policy and Economic Growth: Lessons from the 1980s

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Michael J. Boskin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

The past seven years of U.S. economic policy and performance constitute a truly remarkable, if confusing, experiment. Few would have guessed in 1980 that inflation would fall rapidly to 4 percent and hold pretty steady during a lengthy recovery; that prod...

The Modigliani-Miller Propositions after Thirty Years

By Merton H. Miller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

This issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives appears on the 30th anniversary of the Modigliani-Miller propositions in "The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment," published in the American Economic Review, June 1958. The ...