Expecting the Unexpected: Emissions Uncertainty and Environmental Market Design

By Severin Borenstein, James Bushnell, Frank A. Wolak, and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins

American Economic Review, November 2019

We study potential equilibria in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases (GHGs) based on information available before the market started. We find large ex ante uncertainty in business-as-usual emissions and in the abatement that might resul...

Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building

By Samuel Bazzi, Arya Gaduh, Alexander D. Rothenberg, and Maisy Wong

American Economic Review, November 2019

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find grea...

Market Failure in Kidney Exchange

By Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Eduardo Azevedo, Clayton R. Featherstone, and Ömer Karaduman

American Economic Review, November 2019

We show that kidney exchange markets suffer from market failures whose remedy could increase transplants by 30 to 63 percent. First, we document that the market is fragmented and inefficient; most transplants are arranged by hospitals instead of national ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

What Do Economists Have to Say about the Clean Air Act 50 Years after the Establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency?

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By Janet Currie and Reed Walker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Air quality in the United States has improved dramatically over the past 50 years in large part due to the introduction of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce it. This article is a reflection on the 50-year...

Policy Evolution under the Clean Air Act

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

The US Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 with strong bipartisan support, was the first environmental law to give the federal government a serious regulatory role, established the architecture of the US air pollution control system, and became a model for su...

US Water Pollution Regulation over the Past Half Century: Burning Waters to Crystal Springs?

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By David A. Keiser and Joseph S. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In the half century since the founding of the US Environmental Protection Agency, public and private US sources have spent nearly $5 trillion ($2017) to provide clean rivers, lakes, and drinking water (annual spending of 0.8 percent of US GDP in most ye...

On Latin American Populism, and Its Echoes around the World

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Sebastian Edwards

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In this article, I discuss the ways in which populist experiments have evolved historically. Populists are charismatic leaders who use a fiery rhetoric to pitch the interests of "the people" against those of banks, large firms, multinational companies, ...

Informational Autocrats

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into submission, "informational autocrats" artificially boost their popularity by c...

The Surge of Economic Nationalism in Western Europe

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

We document the surge of economic nationalist and radical-right parties in western Europe between the early 1990s and 2016. We discuss how economic shocks contribute to explaining this political shift, looking in turn at theory and evidence on the polit...

Economic Insecurity and the Causes of Populism, Reconsidered

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Yotam Margalit

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Growing conventional wisdom holds that a chief driver of the populist vote is economic insecurity. I contend that this view overstates the role of economic insecurity as an explanation in several ways. First, it conflates the significance of economic in...

What They Were Thinking Then: The Consequences for Macroeconomics during the Past 60 Years

By George A. Akerlof

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

This article explores the development of Keynesian macroeconomics in its early years, and especially in the Big Bang period immediately after the publication of The General Theory. In this period, as standard macroeconomics evolved into the "Ke...

The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare

By Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David E. Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

We examine conventional approaches to evaluating the economic impact of protectionist trade policies. We illustrate these conventional approaches by applying them to the tariffs introduced by the Trump administration during 2018. In the wake of this i...

Retrospectives: Tragedy of the Commons after 50 Years

By Brett M. Frischmann, Alain Marciano, and Giovanni Battista Ramello

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) has been incredibly influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin focused on the stress population growth inevitably placed ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Carbon Taxes and CO₂ Emissions: Sweden as a Case Study

By Julius J. Andersson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

This quasi-experimental study is the first to find a significant causal effect of carbon taxes on emissions, empirically analyzing the implementation of a carbon tax and a value-added tax on transport fuel in Sweden. After implementation, carbon dioxide e...

Price Regulation, Price Discrimination, and Equality of Opportunity in Higher Education: Evidence from Texas

By Rodney J. Andrews and Kevin M. Stange

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

We assess the importance of price regulation and price discrimination to low-income students' access to opportunities in public higher education. In 2003, Texas shifted tuition-setting authority away from the state legislature to public universities thems...

Incentives and Unintended Consequences: Spillover Effects in Food Choice

By Manuela Angelucci, Silvia Prina, Heather Royer, and Anya Samek

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Little is known about how peers influence the impact of incentives. We study how peers' actions and incentives can lead to peer spillover effects. Using a field experiment on snack choice in the school lunchroom (choice of grapes versus cookies), we rando...

Sustaining Honesty in Public Service: The Role of Selection

By Sebastian Barfort, Nikolaj A. Harmon, Frederik Hjorth, and Asmus Leth Olsen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

We study the role of self-selection into public service in sustaining honesty in the public sector. Focusing on the world's least corrupt country, Denmark, we use a survey experiment to document strong self-selection of more honest individuals into public...