Giving Mom a Break: The Impact of Higher EITC Payments on Maternal Health

By William N. Evans and Craig L. Garthwaite

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

The 1993 expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit created the first meaningful separation in benefits between families containing two or more children and those with only one child. If income is protective of health, we should see improvements over t...

The Effect of Disability Insurance Receipt on Labor Supply

By Eric French and Jae Song

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

This paper exploits the effectively random assignment of judges to Disability Insurance cases to estimate the causal impact of Disability Insurance receipt on labor supply. We find that benefit receipt reduces labor force participation by 26 percentage...

Civil Service Rules and Policy Choices: Evidence from US State Governments

By Gergely Ujhelyi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

This paper studies the policy impact of civil service regulations, exploiting reforms undertaken by US state governments throughout the twentieth century. These reforms replaced political patronage with a civil service recruited based on merit and prot...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics

[Symposium: Big Data]

By Hal R. Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Computers are now involved in many economic transactions and can capture data associated with these transactions, which can then be manipulated and analyzed. Conventional statistical and econometric techniques such as regression often work well, but there...

High-Dimensional Methods and Inference on Structural and Treatment Effects

[Symposium: Big Data]

By Alexandre Belloni, Victor Chernozhukov, and Christian Hansen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Data with a large number of variables relative to the sample size—"high-dimensional data"—are readily available and increasingly common in empirical economics. High-dimensional data arise through a combination of two phenomena. First, the data may be ...

Political Campaigns and Big Data

[Symposium: Big Data]

By David W. Nickerson and Todd Rogers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Modern campaigns develop databases of detailed information about citizens to inform electoral strategy and to guide tactical efforts. Despite sensational reports about the value of individual consumer data, the most valuable information campaigns acquire ...

Privacy and Data-Based Research

[Symposium: Big Data]

By Ori Heffetz and Katrina Ligett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

What can we, as users of microdata, formally guarantee to the individuals (or firms) in our dataset, regarding their privacy? We retell a few stories, well-known in data-privacy circles, of failed anonymization attempts in publicly released datasets. We t...

Slicing Up Global Value Chains

[Symposium: Global Supply Chains]

By Marcel P. Timmer, Abdul Azeez Erumban, Bart Los, Robert Stehrer, and Gaaitzen J. de Vries

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

In this paper, we "slice up the global value chain" using a decomposition technique that has recently become feasible due to the development of the World Input-Output Database. We trace the value added by all labor and capital that is directly and indirec...

Five Facts about Value-Added Exports and Implications for Macroeconomics and Trade Research

[Symposium: Global Supply Chains]

By Robert C. Johnson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Due to the rise of global supply chains, gross exports do not accurately measure the amount of value added exchanged between countries. I highlight five facts about differences between gross and value-added exports. These differences are large and growing...

Raj Chetty: 2013 Clark Medal Recipient

By Martin Feldstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Raj Chetty is eminently deserving of being awarded the John Bates Clark Medal at the age of 33. His research has transformed the field of public economics. His work is motivated by important public policy issues in the fields of taxation, social insurance...

Fluctuations in Uncertainty

By Nicholas Bloom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Uncertainty is an amorphous concept. It reflects uncertainty in the minds of consumers, managers, and policymakers about possible futures. It is also a broad concept, including uncertainty over the path of macro phenomena like GDP growth, micro phenomena ...

The Market for Blood

By Robert Slonim, Carmen Wang, and Ellen Garbarino

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Donating blood, "the gift of life," is among the noblest activities and it is performed worldwide nearly 100 million times annually. The economic perspective presented here shows how the gift of life, albeit noble and often motivated by altruism, is heavi...

Retrospectives: The Cyclical Behavior of Labor Productivity and the Emergence of the Labor Hoarding Concept

By Jeff E. Biddle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

The concept of "labor hoarding," at least in its modern form, was first fully articulated in the early 1960s by Arthur Okun (1963). By the end of the 20th century, the concept of "labor hoarding" had become an accepted part of economists' explanations of ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Correction and Update: The Economic Effects of Climate Change

By Richard S. J. Tol

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Gremlins intervened in the preparation of my paper "The Economic Effects of Climate Change" published in the Spring 2009 issue of this journal. In Table 1 of that paper, titled "Estimates of the Welfare Impact of Climate Change," minus signs were dropped ...

Farewell to Notes

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

President's Foreword

By William D. Nordhaus

American Economic Review, May 2014

Editor's Introduction

By William R. Johnson

American Economic Review, May 2014