Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

The Importance of School Systems: Evidence from International Differences in Student Achievement

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Ludger Woessmann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school--socioeconomic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school...

Accountability in US Education: Applying Lessons from K-12 Experience to Higher Education

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By David J. Deming and David Figlio

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

A new push for accountability has become an increasingly important feature of education policy in the United States and throughout the world. Broadly speaking, accountability seeks to hold educational institutions responsible for student outcome using too...

What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries?

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Julia Chabrier, Sarah Cohodes, and Philip Oreopoulos

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

We take a closer look at what can be learned about charter schools by pooling data from lottery-based impact estimates of the effect of charter school attendance at 113 schools. On average, each year enrolled at one of these schools increases math scores ...

The Measurement of Student Ability in Modern Assessment Systems

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Brian Jacob and Jesse Rothstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Economists often use test scores to measure a student’s performance or an adult’s human capital. These scores reflect nontrivial decisions about how to measure and scale student achievement, with important implications for secondary analyses. For exam...

The Need for Accountability in Education in Developing Countries

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Isaac M. Mbiti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Despite the rapid growth in enrollment rates across the developing world, there are major concerns about the quality of education that children receive. Across numerous developing countries, recent learning assessments have revealed that children are not ...

The Mechanics of Motivated Reasoning

[Symposium: Motivated Beliefs]

By Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Whenever we see voters explain away their preferred candidate's weaknesses, dieters assert that a couple scoops of ice cream won't really hurt their weight loss goals, or parents maintain that their children are unusually gifted, we are reminded that peop...

Mindful Economics: The Production, Consumption, and Value of Beliefs

[Symposium: Motivated Beliefs]

By Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

In this paper, we provide a perspective into the main ideas and findings emerging from the growing literature on motivated beliefs and reasoning. This perspective emphasizes that beliefs often fulfill important psychological and functional needs of the in...

The Preference for Belief Consonance

[Symposium: Motivated Beliefs]

By Russell Golman, George Loewenstein, Karl Ove Moene, and Luca Zarri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

We consider the determinants and consequences of a source of utility that has received limited attention from economists: people's desire for the beliefs of other people to align with their own. We relate this 'preference for belief consonance' to a varie...

Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically

[Symposium: Motivated Beliefs]

By Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton, and Roberto A. Weber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Research yields ample evidence that individual's behavior often reflects an apparent concern for moral considerations. A natural way to interpret evidence of such motives using an economic framework is to add an argument to the utility function such that ...

In Defense of the NSF Economics Program

[Symposium: NSF Funding for Economists]

By Robert A. Moffitt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

The NSF Economics program funds basic research in economics across all its disparate fields. Its budget has experienced a long period of stagnation and decline, with its real value in 2013 below that in 1980 and having declined by 50 percent as a percent ...

A Skeptical View of the National Science Foundation's Role in Economic Research

[Symposium: NSF Funding for Economists]

By Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

We can imagine a plausible case for government support of science based on traditional economic reasons of externalities and public goods. Yet when it comes to government support of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for economic research, ...

Can War Foster Cooperation?

By Michal Bauer, Christopher Blattman, Julie Chytilová, Joseph Henrich, Edward Miguel, and Tamar Mitts

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community pa...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2016

Includes Distinguished Fellow Hal R. Varian.

Robust Social Decisions

By Eric Danan, Thibault Gajdos, Brian Hill, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Review, September 2016

We propose and operationalize normative principles to guide social decisions when individuals potentially have imprecise and heterogeneous beliefs, in addition to conflicting tastes or interests. To do so, we adapt the standard Pareto principle to those p...

Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time

By Charles I. Jones and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, September 2016

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-c...

Bailouts, Time Inconsistency, and Optimal Regulation: A Macroeconomic View

By V. V. Chari and Patrick J. Kehoe

American Economic Review, September 2016

A common view is that bailouts of firms by governments are needed to cure inefficiencies in private markets. We propose an alternative view: even when private markets are efficient, costly bankruptcies will occur and benevolent governments without commitm...

Long-Run Risk Is the Worst-Case Scenario

By Rhys Bidder and Ian Dew-Becker

American Economic Review, September 2016

We study an investor who is unsure of the dynamics of the economy. Not only are parameters unknown, but the investor does not even know what order model to estimate. She estimates her consumption process nonparametrically--allowing potentially infinite-or...

Properties of the Combinatorial Clock Auction

By Jonathan Levin and Andrzej Skrzypacz

American Economic Review, September 2016

The combinatorial clock auction has become popular for large-scale spectrum awards and other uses, replacing more traditional ascending or clock auctions. We describe some surprising properties of the auction, including a wide range of ex post equilibria ...