Technology Growth and Expenditure Growth in Health Care

By Amitabh Chandra and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

In the United States, health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates, yet health care spending relative to GDP has also grown more rapidly than in any other country. We develop a model of patient demand and supplier behavior to explain th...

Globalization, Brain Drain, and Development

By Frédéric Docquier and Hillel Rapoport

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

This paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain, with a focus on recent contributions and on development issues. We first assess the magnitude, intensity, and determinants of the brain drain, showing that brain drain (or high-skil...

Forensic Economics

By Eric Zitzewitz

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

A new meta-field of "forensic economics" has begun to emerge, uncovering evidence of hidden behavior in a variety of domains. Examples include teachers cheating on exams, road builders skimping on materials, violations of U.N. sanctions, unnecessary heart...

The Mirrlees Review and the State of Public Economics

By Anthony B. Atkinson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

The Mirrlees Review of taxation in the United Kingdom is a landmark in the analysis of U.K. fiscal policy, and of wide interest to public finance economists around the world. This review concentrates on what we can learn from the Review about the current ...

The Mirrlees Review

By Martin Feldstein

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

The Mirrlees Review is an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the British tax system with detailed recommendations for reform. This review essay focuses on those issues that are also likely to be of interest to an American reader. The Review has the t...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

The Geography of Conflicts and Regional Trade Agreements

By Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

In addition to standard trade gains, regional trade agreements (RTAs) can promote peaceful relations by increasing the opportunity cost of conflicts. Country pairs with large trade gains from RTAs and a high probability of conflict should be more likely t...

Measuring What Employers Do about Entry Wages over the Business Cycle: A New Approach

By Pedro S. Martins, Gary Solon, and Jonathan P. Thomas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

Rigidity in real hiring wages plays a crucial role in some recent macroeconomic models. But are hiring wages really so noncyclical? We propose using employer/employee longitudinal data to track the cyclical variation in the wages paid to workers newly hir...

Evidence on the Incidence of Wage Posting, Wage Bargaining, and On-the-Job Search

By Robert E. Hall and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others face a posted wage as a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. Both modes of wage determination have generated large bodies of research. We surveyed a representative sample of US wor...

Exogenous versus Endogenous Separation

By Shigeru Fujita and Garey Ramey

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

This paper assesses how various approaches to modeling the separation margin affect the quantitative ability of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor matching model. The model with a constant separation rate fails to produce realistic volatility and productivit...

Home Equity Lending and Retail Spending: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Texas

By Chadi S. Abdallah and William D. Lastrapes

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

We estimate how spending in Texas responded to a 1997 constitutional amendment that relaxed severe restrictions on home equity lending. We use this event as a natural experiment to estimate the importance of credit constraints. If households are credit-...

Why Are Target Interest Rate Changes So Persistent?

By Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

While the degree of policy inertia in central banks' reaction functions is a central ingredient in theoretical and empirical monetary economics, the source of the observed policy inertia in the United States is controversial, with tests of competing hypo...

Financial Contracts and the Political Economy of Investor Protection

By Pavel Ševčík

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

This paper studies the joint dynamics of investor protection and economic development in a political economy model with capital accumulation and occupational choice. Less investor protection implies higher costs of external financing for entrepreneurs. T...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil

By Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

We estimate the effect of television on fertility in Brazil, where soap operas portray small families. We exploit differences in the timing of entry into different markets of Globo, the main novela producer. Women living in areas covered by Globo have sig...

Estimating the Deterrent Effect of Incarceration Using Sentencing Enhancements

By David S. Abrams

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

Increasing criminal sanctions may reduce crime through two primary mechanisms: deterrence and incapacitation. Disentangling their effects is crucial for optimal policy setting. I use sentence enhancements due to the introduction of state add-on gun laws...

Can Compulsory Military Service Raise Civilian Wages? Evidence from the Peacetime Draft in Portugal

By David Card and Ana Rute Cardoso

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

We provide new evidence on the long-term impacts of peacetime conscription, using longitudinal data for Portuguese men born in 1967. These men were inducted at age 21, allowing us to use preconscription wages to control for ability differences between con...