Optimal Life Cycle Unemployment Insurance

By Claudio Michelacci and Hernán Ruffo

American Economic Review, February 2015

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return...

Evidence for Countercyclical Risk Aversion: An Experiment with Financial Professionals

By Alain Cohn, Jan Engelmann, Ernst Fehr, and Michel André Maréchal

American Economic Review, February 2015

Countercyclical risk aversion can explain major puzzles such as the high volatility of asset prices. Evidence for its existence is, however, scarce because of the host of factors that simultaneously change during financial cycles. We circumvent these p...

Information Disclosure as a Matching Mechanism: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Steven Tadelis and Florian Zettelmeyer

American Economic Review, February 2015

Market outcomes depend on the quality of information available to its participants. We measure the effect of information disclosure on market outcomes using a large-scale field experiment that randomly discloses quality information in wholesale automob...

Thar SHE Blows? Gender, Competition, and Bubbles in Experimental Asset Markets

By Catherine C. Eckel and Sascha C. Füllbrunn

American Economic Review, February 2015

Do women and men behave differently in financial asset markets? Our results from an asset market experiment show a marked gender difference in producing speculative price bubbles. Mixed markets show intermediate values, and a meta-analysis of 35 market...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2015

The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue...

Pareto and Piketty: The Macroeconomics of Top Income and Wealth Inequality

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Charles I. Jones

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Since the early 2000s, research by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and their coauthors has revolutionized our understanding of income and wealth inequality. In this paper, I highlight some of the key empirical facts from this research and comment on how ...

What Do We Know about the Evolution of Top Wealth Shares in the United States?

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Wojciech Kopczuk

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

I discuss available evidence about the evolution of top wealth shares in the United States over the course of the 20th century. The three main approaches—the Survey of Consumer Finances, estate tax multiplier, and capitalization methods—gene...

Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Thomas Piketty

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

When a lengthy book is widely discussed in academic circles and the popular media, it is probably inevitable that the arguments of the book will be simplified in the telling and retelling. In the case of my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

The Superiority of Economists

By Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

In this essay, we analyze the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of t...

The Case for Paying College Athletes

By Allen R. Sanderson and John J. Siegfried

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Big-time commercialized intercollegiate athletics has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Popularity of this uniquely American activity, measured by attendance, television ratings, or team revenues, has never been higher. At the same time,...

Pricing in the Market for Anticancer Drugs

By David H. Howard, Peter B. Bach, Ernst R. Berndt, and Rena M. Conti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

In 2011, Bristol-Myers Squibb set the price of its newly approved melanoma drug ipilimumab— brand name Yervoy—at $120,000 for a course of therapy. The drug was associated with an incremental increase in life expectancy of four months. Drugs ...

The Window Tax: A Case Study in Excess Burden

By Wallace E. Oates and Robert M. Schwab

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

The window tax provides a dramatic and transparent historical example of the potential distorting effects of taxation. Imposed in England in 1696, the tax—a kind of predecessor of the modern property tax—was levied on dwellings with the tax ...

Matthew Gentzkow, Winner of the 2014 Clark Medal

By Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

The 2014 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The citation recognized Matt's "fundamental contributions to our understanding of the economic fo...

Retrospectives: The Marginal Cost Controversy

By Brett M. Frischmann and Christiaan Hogendorn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

From 1938 to 1950, there was a spirited debate about whether decreasing-average-cost industries should set prices at marginal cost, with attendant subsidies if necessary. In 1938, Harold Hotelling published a forceful and far-reaching proposal for margi...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Correspondence: Fair Trade Coffee

By Victor V. Claar and Colleen E. Haight

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Editorial Note: Correction to Richard S. Tol's "The Economic Effects of Climate Change"

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2015