Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project

By Abhishek Nagaraj and Imke Reimers

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

The free digital distribution of creative works could cannibalize demand for physical versions, but it could also boost physical sales by enabling consumers to discover the original work. We study the impact of the Google Books digitization project on the...

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students

By David N. Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart, and Krzysztof Karbownik

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students' outcomes as the program matured and sc...

Information and Spillovers from Targeting Policy in Peru's Anchoveta Fishery

By Gabriel Englander

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

This paper establishes that a targeted policy backfires because it reveals information about nontargeted units. In the world's largest fishery, the regulator attempts to reduce the harvesting of juvenile fish by temporarily closing areas where the share o...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Where Does Wealth Come From? Measuring Lifetime Resources in Norway

[Symposium: Wealth]

By Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux, Fanny Landaud, and Kjell G. Salvanes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

In this paper, we use comprehensive administrative data on the population of Norway to create a measure of lifetime resources, which generates several stylized facts. First, lifetime resources are highly correlated with net wealth, but net wealth is more ...

The Importance of Financial Literacy: Opening a New Field

[Symposium: Wealth]

By Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to determine who is ...

Transmission Impossible? Prospects for Decarbonizing the US Grid

[Symposium: The Electricity Grid]

By Lucas W. Davis, Catherine Hausman, and Nancy L. Rose

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Encouraged by the declining cost of grid-scale renewables, recent analyses conclude that the United States could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at relatively low cost using currently available technologies. While the cost of renewable gen...

The Economics of Electricity Reliability

[Symposium: The Electricity Grid]

By Severin Borenstein, James Bushnell, and Erin Mansur

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

The physics of an electrical grid requires that the supply injected into the grid is always in balance with the quantity consumed. If that balance is not maintained, cascading outages are likely to disrupt supply to all consumers on the grid. In the past,...

The Economics Profession's Socioeconomic Diversity Problem

[Symposium: Economics Career Paths]

By Anna Stansbury and Robert Schultz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

It is well-documented that women and racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the economics profession, relative to both the general population and other academic disciplines. Less is known about the socioeconomic diversity of the economics pr...

The Evolution of Work from Home

[Symposium: After the Pandemic]

By José María Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20–64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the big shift to work from home has end...

Early Career Paths of Economists inside and outside of Academia

[Symposium: Economics Career Paths]

By Lucia Foster, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Economics job candidates face considerable professional and financial uncertainties when deciding between academic and nonacademic career paths. Using novel panel data, we provide a broad picture of PhD economists' early career mobility and earnings growt...

Retrospectives: Margaret Reid, Chicago, and Permanent Income

By Evelyn L. Forget

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Margaret Gilpin Reid (1896–1990) began her career as a home economist and, with Dorothy Brady, Milton and Rose Friedman, played a central role in the development of the permanent income hypothesis at Chicago. Reid was the first woman to be elected Fello...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Why Did the Best Prepared Country in the World Fare So Poorly during COVID?

[Symposium: After the Pandemic]

By Jennifer B. Nuzzo and Jorge R. Ledesma

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Though all countries struggled to respond to COVID-19, the United States' poor performance during the pandemic was unexpected. Despite having more pandemic preparedness capacities than other countries, the United States experienced more than one million...

COVID-19, School Closures, and Outcomes

[Symposium: After the Pandemic]

By Rebecca Jack and Emily Oster

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

This article discusses the question of data and our perspective on the importance of public, accessible, and contemporaneous data in the face of public crisis. Then, we present data on the extent of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, both globa...

Changes in the Distribution of Black and White Wealth since the US Civil War

[Symposium: Wealth]

By Ellora Derenoncourt, Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, and Moritz Schularick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

The difference in the average wealth of Black and white Americans narrowed in the first century after the Civil War, but remained large and even widened again after 1980. Given high levels of wealth concentration both historically and today, dynamics at t...

Why Do Retired Households Draw Down Their Wealth So Slowly?

[Symposium: Wealth]

By Eric French, John Bailey Jones, and Rory McGee

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Retired households, especially those with high lifetime income, decumulate their wealth very slowly, and many die leaving large estates. The three leading explanations for the "retirement savings puzzle" are the desire to insure against uncertain lifespan...

Refugees, policymaking, and decarceration

[News]

October 13, 2023

Reading recommendations from Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives"