Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Women in Economics: Stalled Progress

[Symposium: Women in Economics]

By Shelly Lundberg and Jenna Stearns

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Women are still a minority in the economics profession. By the mid-2000s, just under 35 percent of PhD students and 30 percent of assistant professors were female, and these numbers have remained roughly constant ever since. Over the past two decades, w...

Variation in Women's Success across PhD Programs in Economics

[Symposium: Women in Economics]

By Leah Boustan and Andrew Langan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

We document wide and persistent variation in women's representation and success across graduate programs in economics. Using new data on early career outcomes for recent graduates, including first job placement, publications, and promotion, we rank (ano...

Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: Strategies for Making Economics Work for Women at Every Stage

[Symposium: Women in Economics]

By Kasey Buckles

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

While women comprise over half of all undergraduate students in the United States, they account for less than one-third of economics majors. From there, the proportion of women at each stage of the academic tenure track continues to decrease, creating a...

Financial Regulation: Still Unsettled a Decade after the Crisis

[Symposium: Financial Stability Regulation]

By Daniel K. Tarullo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

A decade after the darkest moments of the financial crisis, both the US financial system and the legal framework for its regulation are still in flux. The post-crisis regulatory framework has made systemically important banks much more resilient. They a...

Prone to Fail: The Pre-crisis Financial System

[Symposium: Financial Stability Regulation]

By Darrell Duffie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The financial crisis that began in 2007 was triggered by over-leveraged homeowners and a severe downturn in US housing markets. However, a reasonably well-supervised financial system would have been much more resilient to this and other types of severe ...

Would Macroprudential Regulation Have Prevented the Last Crisis?

[Symposium: Financial Stability Regulation]

By David Aikman, Jonathan Bridges, Anil Kashyap, and Caspar Siegert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

How well equipped are today's macroprudential regimes to deal with a rerun of the factors that led to the global financial crisis? To address the factors that made the last crisis so severe, a macroprudential regulator would need to implement policies t...

The Value of US Government Data to US Business Decisions

[Symposium: Public Provision of Economic Data]

By Ellen Hughes-Cromwick and Julia Coronado

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The US government is a major producer of economic and financial data, statistics, analysis, and forecasts that are gathered, compiled, and published as public goods for use by citizens, government agencies, researchers, nonprofits, and the business comm...

On the Controversies behind the Origins of the Federal Economic Statistics

[Symposium: Public Provision of Economic Data]

By Hugh Rockoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Our federal economic statistics originated in the economic and political divisions in the United States and the bitter debates over economic policy they engendered at the end of the 19th century and during the world wars and Great Depression. Workers we...

Evolving Measurement for an Evolving Economy: Thoughts on 21st Century US Economic Statistics

[Symposium: Public Provision of Economic Data]

By Ron S. Jarmin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The system of federal economic statistics developed in the 20th century has served the country well, but the current methods for collecting and disseminating these data products are unsustainable. These statistics are heavily reliant on sample surveys. ...

Environmental Justice: The Economics of Race, Place, and Pollution

By Spencer Banzhaf, Lala Ma, and Christopher Timmins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The grassroots movement that placed environmental justice issues on the national stage around 1980 was soon followed up by research documenting the correlation between pollution and race and poverty. This work has established inequitable exposure to nui...

Economists (and Economics) in Tech Companies

By Susan Athey and Michael Luca

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

As technology platforms have created new markets and new ways of acquiring information, economists have come to play an increasingly central role in tech companies-tackling problems such as platform design, strategy, pricing, and policy. Over the past f...

Parag Pathak: Winner of the 2018 Clark Medal

By Ariel Pakes and Joel Sobel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The American Economic Association awarded Parag Pathak the 2018 John Bates Clark Medal for his research on the impacts of educational policies. Both the theory and the empirical research take the constraints facing administrators seriously. As a result,...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2019

Beliefs about Gender

By Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Review, March 2019

We conduct laboratory experiments that explore how gender stereotypes shape beliefs about ability of oneself and others in different categories of knowledge. The data reveal two patterns. First, men's and women's beliefs about both oneself and others exce...

Familiarity Does Not Breed Contempt: Generosity, Discrimination, and Diversity in Delhi Schools

By Gautam Rao

American Economic Review, March 2019

I exploit a natural experiment in Indian schools to study how being integrated with poor students affects the social behaviors and academic outcomes of rich students. Using administrative data, lab and field experiments to measure outcomes, I find that ha...

The Quanto Theory of Exchange Rates

By Lukas Kremens and Ian Martin

American Economic Review, March 2019

We present a new identity that relates expected exchange rate appreciation to a risk-neutral covariance term, and use it to motivate a currency forecasting variable based on the prices of quanto index contracts. We show via panel regressions that the quan...

How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic

By John Gathergood, Neale Mahoney, Neil Stewart, and Jörg Weber

American Economic Review, March 2019

We study how individuals repay their debt using linked data on multiple credit cards. Repayments are not allocated to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing. Moreover, the degree of misallocation is invariant to the econ...

Auctions with Limited Commitment

By Qingmin Liu, Konrad Mierendorff, Xianwen Shi, and Weijie Zhong

American Economic Review, March 2019

We study the role of limited commitment in a standard auction environment. In each period, the seller can commit to an auction with a reserve price but not to future reserve prices. We characterize the set of equilibrium profits attainable for the seller ...