General Equilibrium Impacts of a Federal Clean Energy Standard

By Lawrence H. Goulder, Marc A. C. Hafstead, and Roberton C. Williams III

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

Economists have tended to view emissions pricing (e.g., cap and trade or a carbon tax) as the most cost-effective approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper offers a different view. Employing analytical and numerically solved general equ...

Controlling Health Care Costs through Limited Network Insurance Plans: Evidence from Massachusetts State Employees

By Jonathan Gruber and Robin McKnight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

We investigate the impact of limited network insurance plans in the context of the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC), the insurance plan for state employees. Our quasi-experimental analysis examines the introduction of a major financial in...

Does Tax-Collection Invariance Hold? Evasion and the Pass-Through of State Diesel Taxes

By Wojciech Kopczuk, Justin Marion, Erich Muehlegger, and Joel Slemrod

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

In simple models, the incidence of a tax is independent of the identity of the remitting party. We illustrate that this prediction fails to hold if opportunities for evasion differ across economic agents. Second, we estimate how the incidence of state ...

Corruption in Procurement and the Political Cycle in Tunneling: Evidence from Financial Transactions Data

By Maxim Mironov and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

We provide evidence of corruption in allocation of public procurement and assess its efficiency. Firms with procurement revenue increase tunneling around regional elections, whereas neither tunneling of firms without procurement revenue, nor legitimate...

Assessing Financial Education: Evidence from Boot Camp

By William Skimmyhorn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

This study estimates the effects of Personal Financial Management Course attendance and enrollment assistance using a natural experiment in the US Army. New enlistees' course attendance reduces the probability of having credit account balances, average...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Consumption Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Orazio P. Attanasio and Luigi Pistaferri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this essay, we discuss the importance of consumption inequality in the debate concerning the measurement of disparities in economic well-being. We summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using consumption as opposed to income for measuring trends...

Mortality Inequality: The Good News from a County-Level Approach

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this essay, we ask whether the distributions of life expectancy and mortality have become generally more unequal, as many seem to believe, and we report some good news. Focusing on groups of counties ranked by their poverty rates, we show that gains in...

Health Insurance and Income Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Robert Kaestner and Darren Lubotsky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Health insurance and other in-kind forms of compensation and government benefits are typically not included in measures of income and analyses of inequality. This omission is important. Given the large and growing cost of health care in the United States...

Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Shelly Lundberg, Robert A. Pollak, and Jenna Stearns

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Popular discussions of changes in American families over the past 60 years have revolved around the "retreat from marriage." Concern has focused on increasing levels of nonmarital childbearing, as well as falling marriage rates that stem from both increas...

Crime, the Criminal Justice System, and Socioeconomic Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Magnus Lofstrom and Steven Raphael

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disprop...

Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Trade-Offs

By Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz, and Tommaso Valletti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers...

The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Measurement and Research

By Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

A large and growing share of retail prices all over the world are posted online on the websites of retailers. This is a massive and (until recently) untapped source of retail price information. Our objective with the Billion Prices Project, created at MIT...

The Masking of the Decline in Manufacturing Employment by the Housing Bubble

By Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

The employment-to-population ratio among prime-aged adults aged 25–54 has fallen substantially since 2000. The explanations proposed for the decline in the employment-to-population ratio have been of two broad types. One set of explanations emphasizes c...

Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics

By Robert A. Baade and Victor A. Matheson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this paper, we explore the costs and benefits of hosting the Olympic Games. On the cost side, there are three major categories: general infrastructure such as transportation and housing to accommodate athletes and fans; specific sports infrastructure r...

Retrospectives: How Economists Came to Accept Expected Utility Theory: The Case of Samuelson and Savage

By Ivan Moscati

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Expected utility theory dominated the economic analysis of individual decision-making under risk from the early 1950s to the 1990. Among the early supporters of the expected utility hypothesis in the von Neumann–Morgenstern version were Milton Friedman ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Correspondence: Scoring Social Security Proposals

By Peter Diamond, Kashin Konstantin, Gary King, and Samir Soneji

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2016

Foreword

By Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, May 2016