The Case for a New Fiscal Constitution

[Symposium: Bias in the Budget]

By William A. Niskanen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

For the first 140 years of U.S. history, the federal budget was effectively constrained by two fiscal rules: the formal limits within the Constitution on the enumerated spending powers and an informal rule that the government could borrow only during rece...

Is There a Bias toward Excess in U.S. Government Budgets or Deficits?

[Symposium: Bias in the Budget]

By Charles L. Schultze

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Do the political institutions of a majoritarian representative democracy, and in particular those of the United States, systematically produce either levels of public spending or budget deficits that are excessive? Should U.S. political institutions be al...

The Evolution of U.S. Airline Competition

[Symposium: Airline Deregulation]

By Severin Borenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

The next section reviews the evolution of the domestic airline industry since the late 1970s, when it was abruptly freed from most regulatory constraints on pricing, entry, and exit. (International air travel is considered here only as it relates to compe...

Fear of Flying? Economic Analysis of Airline Safety

[Symposium: Airline Deregulation]

By Nancy L. Rose

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

The safety of the commercial airline industry has attracted considerable attention in the wake of airline deregulation, amid growing concerns that the historical superiority of U.S. jet carriers' safety records may have been linked to economic regulation ...

Controlling Automobile Insurance Costs

By J. David Cummins and Sharon Tennyson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

We begin by providing an overview of the auto insurance system and the structure of the auto insurance market. We then turn to an analysis of the factors underlying the auto insurance price increases experienced in recent years. We find that the auto insu...

Whom or What Does the Representative Individual Represent?

By Alan P. Kirman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Macroeconomic models often assume that the choices of all the diverse agents in one sector—consumers for example—can be considered as the choices of one "representative" standard utility maximizing individual whose choices coincide with the ag...

Economics in the Former Soviet Union

By Michael Alexeev, Clifford Gaddy, and Jim Leitzel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

One of the most notable, but least discussed, aspects of the halting attempts during the past six years to reform the economies of the Soviet Union, and now those of its successor states, has been the prominent role played by professional economists. Not ...

Who Benefits from Affirmative Action? The Case of the AEA Summer Minority Program 1986-1990

By Michael A. Leeds

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Since 1974, the American Economic Association Summer Minority Program (AEASMP) has provided minority undergraduates with intensive training in the core areas of economics. From 1986 to 1990, while the program was at Temple University, this consisted of ad...

Distinguished Fellow: Mincering Labor Economics

By Sherwin Rosen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Jacob Mincer has helped set the research agenda and professional style in labor economics for over 30 years. His research helped uncover the empirical content of human capital theory, where he used those ideas to study the determinants of earnings and the...

Policy Watch: Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards

By Robert W. Crandall

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Initially, the minimum corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) program was promoted as a policy to reduce U.S. vulnerability to oil shocks. In the past two years, however, concern about global warming has resulted in new political pressures to raise CAFE on...

Retrospectives: Pareto's Law

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Vilfredo Pareto, using data for England, a number of Italian cities, several German states, Paris, and Peru, plotted cumulative distributions of income for these countries on double logarithmic paper. He claimed that in each case the result was a straight...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Correspondence: Are Economists Different?

By Ralph Lattimore

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Medical Care Costs: How Much Welfare Loss?

[Symposium: Health Economics]

By Joseph P. Newhouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Hardly a week goes by without a front-page newspaper article on rising health care costs and the uninsured. In this article, I focus mainly on costs, arguing that the issue has been somewhat misconceived: while the level of medical care spending in the U....

Diffusion of Information in Medical Care

[Symposium: Health Economics]

By Charles E. Phelps

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

This paper presents evidence that doctors behave very differently in making treatment recommendations depending on the region where they work, creating large variations in the quantities of care delivered to seemingly standardized populations. This eviden...

Possible Reforms for Financing Long-Term Care

[Symposium: Health Economics]

By William J. Scanlon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

This paper considers the market for long-term care services to treat and compensate for chronic health conditions and disabilities. This paper describes how the long-term care market has evolved and the resulting implications for expenditure control. It r...

Symposium on Economists as Policy Advocates

[Symposium: Economists as Policy Advocates]

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Economists as Public Policy Advisers

[Symposium: Economists as Policy Advocates]

By Lee H. Hamilton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

As a member of the Joint Economic Committee for over 15 years I have had ample occasion to observe economists testifying. When I was Chairman of the Committee in the last Congress, for example, we held over 100 hearings and heard from at least that many d...