Epidemics, Inequality, and Poverty in Preindustrial and Early Industrial Times

By Guido Alfani

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Recent research has explored the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics, and the current crisis triggered by COVID-19 prompts us to look at the past for insights about how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth, and health....

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and Its Lessons for COVID-19

By Brian Beach, Karen Clay, and Martin Saavedra

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

This article reviews the global health and economic consequences of the 1918 influenza pandemic, with a particular focus on topics that have seen a renewed interest because of COVID-19. We begin by providing an overview of key contextual and epidemiologic...

Modern Infectious Diseases: Macroeconomic Impacts and Policy Responses

By David E. Bloom, Michael Kuhn, and Klaus Prettner

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

We discuss and review literature on the macroeconomic effects of epidemics and pandemics since the late twentieth century. First, we cover the role of health in driving economic growth and well-being and discuss standard frameworks for assessing the eco...

The Economic Impact of the Black Death

By Remi Jedwab, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European history. We review the evidence for the origins, spread, and mortality of the disease. We document that it was a plausibly exogenous shock to the European economy and trace out its aggregate ...

Symposium: Race and Economic Literature—Introduction

By Trevon D. Logan and Samuel L. Myers Jr.

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

Stratification Economics: Core Constructs and Policy Implications

By Grieve Chelwa, Darrick Hamilton, and James Stewart

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article introduces the core constructs of stratification economics to provide a coherent explanation for the persistence of intergroup inequalities. Aligned with the critical race theory concept of "the property rights in Whiteness," stratification e...

Position and Possessions: Stratification Economics and Intergroup Inequality

By William A. Darity Jr.

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article provides an overview of the origins and development of stratification economics as a subfield that centers the importance of identity, social ranking, and relative group position. Stratification economics developed in response to explanations...

A Nation of Laws, and Race Laws

By Nina Banks and Warren C. Whatley

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article reviews the history of race laws in the United States as distinct from the rule of law, an idea found in the writing and speeches of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American PhD in economics (1921). We review the race laws o...

Black Economists on Race and Policy: Contributions to Education, Poverty and Mobility, and Public Finance

By Dania V. Francis, Bradley L. Hardy, and Damon Jones

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

We explore the contributions of Black economists to research on major economic and social policy problems in the United States. We focus on applications in education, poverty and economic mobility, and public finance to extract common themes and patterns....

Racial Isolation and Marginalization of Economic Research on Race and Crime

By Patrick L. Mason, Samuel L. Myers Jr., and Margaret Simms

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This essay examines the extent to which research on the economics of race and crime produced by Black economists or published in the flagship journal of the organization of Black economists, the Review of Black Political Economy (RBPE), is unde...

Reconceptualizing the path to universal health insurance

[Research Highlight]

June 07, 2023

Mark Shepard discusses the limitations of a “market failures” approach to achieving universal health insurance coverage in the United States.

CTREE Conference 2023

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May 31–June 2, 2023 | Portland, OR

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

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The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities

[Symposium: Sports Economics]

By John J. Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

Since the 1950s, taxpayers have been the primary investors in stadia built for the use of privately-owned professional sports teams. Team owners have argued that sports facilities boost local economic activity; however, economic reasoning and empirical ev...

The Structure of Economic Modeling of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change: Grafting Gross Underestimation of Risk onto Already Narrow Science Models

By Nicholas Stern

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Scientists describe the scale of the risks from unmanaged climate change as potentially immense. However, the scientific models, because they omit key factors that are hard to capture precisely, appear to substantially underestimate these risks. Many ec...

Climate Change Policy: What Do the Models Tell Us?

By Robert S. Pindyck

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Very little. A plethora of integrated assessment models (IAMs) have been constructed and used to estimate the social cost of carbon (SCC) and evaluate alternative abatement policies. These models have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as to...

Tail-Hedge Discounting and the Social Cost of Carbon

By Martin L. Weitzman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

The choice of an overall discount rate for climate change investments depends critically on how different components of investment payoffs are discounted at differing rates reflecting their underlying risk characteristics. Such underlying rates can vary...

Why Is Growth in Developing Countries So Hard to Measure?

By Noam Angrist, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, and Dean Jolliffe

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

Occasional widely publicized controversies have led to the perception that growth statistics from developing countries are not to be trusted. Based on the comparison of several data sources and analysis of novel IMF audit data, we find no support for th...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019