Paying for Kidneys? A Randomized Survey and Choice Experiment

By Julio J. Elías, Nicola Lacetera, and Mario Macis

American Economic Review, August 2019

We conducted a randomized survey with 2,666 US residents to study preferences for legalizing payments to kidney donors. We found strong polarization, with many participants supporting or opposing payments regardless of potential transplant gains. However,...

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?

By Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin

American Economic Review, August 2019

We examine how the premature death of eminent life scientists alters the vitality of their fields. While the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases after the death of a star scientist, the flow of articles by non-collaborators in...

Comparing UK Tax Returns of Foreign Multinationals to Matched Domestic Firms

By Katarzyna Anna Bilicka

American Economic Review, August 2019

In this paper, I use confidential UK corporate tax returns data to explore whether there are systematic differences in the amount of taxable profits that multinational and domestic companies report. I find that the ratio of taxable profits to total assets...

Frictions in a Competitive, Regulated Market: Evidence from Taxis

By Guillaume R. Fréchette, Alessandro Lizzeri, and Tobias Salz

American Economic Review, August 2019

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of a taxi market. The model is estimated using data from New York City yellow cabs. Two salient features by which most taxi markets deviate from the efficient market ideal are, first, matching frictions cr...

Optimal Dynamic Allocation of Attention

By Yeon-Koo Che and Konrad Mierendorff

American Economic Review, August 2019

We consider a decision maker (DM) who, before taking an action, seeks information by allocating her limited attention dynamically over different news sources that are biased toward alternative actions. Endogenous choice of information generates rich dynam...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Are Price-Cost Markups Rising in the United States? A Discussion of the Evidence

[Symposium: Markups]

By Susanto Basu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypo...

Macroeconomics and Market Power: Context, Implications, and Open Questions

[Symposium: Markups]

By Chad Syverson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

This article assesses several aspects of recent macroeconomic market power research. These include the ways market power is defined and measured; the use of accounting data to estimate markups; the quantitative implications of theoretical connections amon...

Do Increasing Markups Matter? Lessons from Empirical Industrial Organization

[Symposium: Markups]

By Steven Berry, Martin Gaynor, and Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

This article considers the recent literature on firm markups in light of both new and classic work in the field of industrial organization. We detail the shortcomings of papers that rely on discredited approaches from the "structure-conduct-performance"...

Protecting Competition in the American Economy: Merger Control, Tech Titans, Labor Markets

[Symposium: Issues in Antitrust]

By Carl Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Accumulating evidence points to the need for more vigorous antitrust enforcement in the United States in three areas. First, stricter merger control is warranted in an economy where large, highly efficient and profitable "superstar" firms account for an i...

The Problem of Bigness: From Standard Oil to Google

[Symposium: Issues in Antitrust]

By Naomi R. Lamoreaux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

This article sets recent expressions of alarm about the monopoly power of technology giants such as Google and Amazon in the long history of Americans' response to big business. I argue that we cannot understand that history unless we realize that Ameri...

How Market Design Emerged from Game Theory: A Mutual Interview

By Alvin E. Roth and Robert B. Wilson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

We interview each other about how game theory and mechanism design evolved into practical market design. When we learned game theory, games were modeled either in terms of the strategies available to the players ("noncooperative games") or the outcomes ...

A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice

By Joshua B. Miller and Adam Sanjurjo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

We show how classic conditional probability puzzles, such as the Monty Hall problem, are intimately related to the recently discovered hot hand selection bias. We explain the connection by way of the principle of restricted choice, an intuitive inferentia...

A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation

By Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen, and Heidi Williams

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to underprovide innovation because of the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the United States and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summarize the pros and cons ...

How Prevalent Is Downward Rigidity in Nominal Wages? International Evidence from Payroll Records and Pay Slips

By Michael W. L. Elsby and Gary Solon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. Contrary evidence from household surveys reasonably has been discounted on the grounds that the measurement of frequen...

Should We Tax Sugar-Sweetened Beverages? An Overview of Theory and Evidence

By Hunt Allcott, Benjamin B. Lockwood, and Dmitry Taubinsky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages are growing in popularity and have generated an active public debate. Are they a good idea? If so, how high should they be? Are such taxes regressive? People in the United States and some other countries consume remark...

Retrospectives: Lord Keynes and Mr. Say: A Proximity of Ideas

By Alain Béraud and Guy Numa

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Since the publication of Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, generations of economists have been led to believe that Say was Keynes's ultimate nemesis. By means of textual and contextual analysis, we show that Keynes and Say held ...

Some Journal of Economic Perspectives Articles Recommended for Classroom Use

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

In 2018, the editors of the Journal of Economic Perspectives invited faculty to send us examples of JEP articles that they had found useful for teaching. We received 250 responses. On the JEP website, we have created a landing page (http...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019