Policy Watch: Child Support Policies

By Robert I. Lerman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

With more parents living apart, the societal problem of parents who fail to share with each other or with their children becomes more acute. Although governments have mainly relied on public transfers to address the resulting economic hardships among chil...

Retrospectives: Consumer Sovereignty

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

The term "consumer sovereignty" is usually traced to William Harold Hutt and his 1936 book Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion. Hutt paid only passing attention to the maximization of consumer welfare or the achievement of market...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Correspondence

By Allan H. Meltzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Correspondence and response regarding: Socialist Economic Transformation

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Accounting for Saving and Capital Formation in the United States, 1947-1991

By Richard Ruggles

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

This paper is concerned with accounting for the saving and capital formation taking place in different sectors of the U.S. economy. In brief, where does saving arise and where is it used? Do some sectors save more than they spend for capital formation and...

The Nation in Depression

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Christina D. Romer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

This paper examines the American Great Depression and the ways in which the U.S. experience during the 1930s resembled that of other countries in some regards and fundamentally differed in other aspects. I also evaluate the evidence on the causes of the G...

Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Robert A. Margo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Recent research on labor markets in the 1930s has shifted attention from aggregate to disaggregate time series and towards microeconomic evidence. The paper begins by reviewing the conventional statistics of the United States labor market during the Great...

Financial Factors in the Great Depression

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Charles W. Calomiris

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Macroeconomists have long argued that financial markets were important sources and propagators of decline during the Great Depression. Turning points during the Depression often coincided with or were preceded by dramatic events in financial markets: stoc...

Transmission of the Great Depression

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Peter Temin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

To a first approximation, the question of how the Great Depression spread from country to country is short and straightforward: fixed exchange rates under the gold standard transmitted negative demand shocks. The first half of this paper will describe cur...

Israel's Stabilization Program of 1985, or Some Simple Truths of Monetary Theory

By Don Patinkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Within a period of two months, and with minimal adverse effects on employment and the real functioning of the economy, Israel's 1985 stabilization program reduced the annual rate of inflation from close to 500 percent to less than 20 percent (correspondin...

Economics of Development and the Development of Economics

By Pranab Bardhan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

The purpose of this paper is to restore some historical perspective by highlighting the many contributions of development economics to the rest of economics. We will point out to the younger generations how some of the glittering ideas they currently play...

Is College Financial Aid Equitable and Efficient?

By Aaron S. Edlin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Two families with identical earnings paths pay dramatically different amounts for college if one saves more than the other. Because saving leads to receiving less financial aid, a family's return to saving is substantially below the social return. This ma...

Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?

By Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

In this paper we investigate whether exposure to the self-interest model commonly used in economics alters the extent to which people behave in self-interested ways. First, we report the results of several empirical studies—some our own, some by oth...

In Honor of Paul Krugman: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Avinash Dixit

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Paul Krugman is the winner of the 1991 John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to "that American economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." I shall attempt to convey a flavor of ...

Policy Watch: Designing an Effective Investment Tax Credit

By Laurence H. Meyer, Joel L. Prakken, and Chris P. Varvares

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

The investment tax credit (ITC) allows firms to reduce their tax liability by an amount related to their expenditures on equipment, and thus reduces the cost of acquiring capital. An investment tax credit can be introduced temporarily to stimulate investm...

Retrospectives: Ethics and the Invisible Hand

By Jerry Evensky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

As modern economists, we use Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor confident that we all know what it means in our discourse: it reflects our admiration for the elegant and smooth functioning of the market system as a coordinator of autonomous individual...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Correspondence: Rent-Seeking and the Costs of Protectionism

By Willem Thorbecke

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993