Mammograms and Mortality: How Has the Evidence Evolved?

[Symposium: Preventive Medicine]

By Amanda E. Kowalski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

Decades of evidence reveal a complicated relationship between mammograms and mortality. Mammograms may detect deadly cancers early, but they may also lead to the diagnosis and potentially fatal treatment of cancers that would never progress to cause sympt...

LGBTQ Economics

By M. V. Lee Badgett, Christopher S. Carpenter, and Dario Sansone

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

Public attitudes and policies toward LGBTQ individuals have improved substantially in recent decades. Economists are actively shaping the discourse around these policies and contributing to our understanding of the economic lives of LGBTQ individuals. In ...

The Ways of Corruption in Infrastructure: Lessons from the Odebrecht Case

By Nicolás Campos, Eduardo Engel, Ronald D. Fischer, and Alexander Galetovic

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

In 2016, the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht was fined 2.6 billion USD by the US Department of Justice. It was the largest corruption case ever prosecuted under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Our examination of judicial documents and media re...

The Rise of Research Teams: Benefits and Costs in Economics

By Benjamin F. Jones

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

Economics research is increasingly performed in teams, and team-authored work has a large and increasing impact advantage. This article considers the benefits and costs of this "rise of teams." Among its benefits, teamwork allows individuals to aggregate ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

The United States of Europe: A Gravity Model Evaluation of the Four Freedoms

[Symposium: European Union]

By Keith Head and Thierry Mayer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

One of the pillars of the 1957 Treaty of Rome that ultimately led to the European Union is the commitment to the four freedoms of movement (goods, services, persons, and capital). Over the following decades, as the members expanded in numbers, they also s...

The Resilience of the Euro

[Symposium: European Union]

By Philip R. Lane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

Over 2014–2019, the euro area charted a substantial post-crisis economic recovery while also reducing macro-financial vulnerabilities. The array of post-crisis institutional reforms has improved the capacity of the euro area to withstand adverse shocks,...

Migration and Labor Market Integration in Europe

[Symposium: European Union]

By David Dorn and Josef Zweimüller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

The European labor market allows for the border-free mobility of workers across 31 countries that cover most of the continent's population. However, rates of migration across European countries remain considerably lower than interstate migration in the Un...

Fiscal Policy in Europe: Controversies over Rules, Mutual Insurance, and Centralization

[Symposium: European Union]

By Florin Bilbiie, Tommaso Monacelli, and Roberto Perotti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

We discuss the main fiscal policy issues in Europe, focusing on two that are at the core of the current debate. The first is that the government deficit and debt were, from the outset, the key objects of contention in the debate that led to the creation...

An Ounce of Prevention

[Symposium: Preventive Medicine]

By Joseph P. Newhouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Rather, preventive measures can be thought of as insu...

The effectiveness of HARP

[Research Highlight]

April 21, 2021

How do homeowners respond when they can suddenly refinance their mortgages at lower rates?

How Do Mortgage Refinances Affect Debt, Default, and Spending? Evidence from HARP

By Joshua Abel and Andreas Fuster

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2021

We use quasi-random access to the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) to identify the causal effect of refinancing into a lower-rate mortgage on borrower balance sheet outcomes. Refinancing substantially reduces borrower default rates on mortgages an...

Hyperlocality, railway competition, and wealth taxes

[News]

May 03, 2021

Reading recommendations from Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Decomposing news shocks

[Page]

How do expectations about the future supply of oil affect today’s oil prices?

Call for Papers: Young Economists’ Competition 2021 - ECB Forum on Central Banking

[News]

May 06, 2021

The deadline for the competition is May 30 2021.

Captive shoppers

[Research Highlight]

April 29, 2021

To what extent are travel barriers driving price dispersion in cities?

Retail Prices in a City

By Alon Eizenberg, Saul Lach, and Merav Oren-Yiftach

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2021

This study examines grocery price differentials across neighborhoods in a large metropolitan area (the city of Jerusalem, Israel). Important variation in access to affordable grocery shopping is documented using CPI data on prices and neighborhood-level...

School spending matters

[Page]

State funding cuts during the Great Recession had lasting effects on student outcomes.

A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing

By Felipe Goncalves and Steven Mello

American Economic Review, May 2021

We estimate the degree to which individual police officers practice racial discrimination. Using a bunching estimation design and data from the Florida Highway Patrol, we show that minorities are less likely to receive a discount on their speeding tickets...

Is No News (Perceived As) Bad News? An Experimental Investigation of Information Disclosure

By Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca, and Daniel Martin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

This paper uses laboratory experiments to directly test a central prediction of disclosure theory: that strategic forces can lead those who possess private information to voluntarily provide it. In a simple sender-receiver game, we find that senders discl...