Federal Coal Program Reform, the Clean Power Plan, and the Interaction of Upstream and Downstream Climate Policies

By Todd D. Gerarden, W. Spencer Reeder, and James H. Stock

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Can supply-side environmental policies that limit the extraction of fossil fuels reduce CO2 emissions? This paper studies interactions between a specific supply-side policy—a carbon surcharge on federal coal royalties—and regulation of emis...

The Political Economy of Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Gérard Roland

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The overriding importance of political constraints in the transition process has led to developments of the theory of the political economy of reform. What are the main insights from that theory? How does it reflect the transition reality? What have we le...

Do Credit Market Shocks Affect the Real Economy? Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Great Recession and "Normal" Economic Times

By Michael Greenstone, Alexandre Mas, and Hoai-Luu Nguyen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Using comprehensive data on bank lending and establishment-level outcomes from 1997–2010, this paper finds that small business lending is an unimportant determinant of small business and overall economic activity. A shift-share style research design is ...

The Returns to a Large Community College Program: Evidence from Admissions Lotteries

By Michel Grosz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

This paper estimates the labor market returns to the associate's degree in nursing (ADN), which is one of the most popular community college programs. I use student-level academic and earnings records across two decades for all community college student...

Optimal Income Taxation with Unemployment and Wage Responses: A Sufficient Statistics Approach

By Kory Kroft, Kavan Kucko, Etienne Lehmann, and Johannes Schmieder

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

We derive a sufficient statistics tax formula in a model that incorporates unemployment and endogenous wages to study the shape of the optimal income tax. Key sufficient statistics are the macro employment response to taxation, the micro and macro partici...

Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA

By Elira Kuka, Na'ama Shenhav, and Kevin Shih

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

This paper studies human capital responses to the availability of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary work authorization and deferral from deportation for undocumented, high-school-educated youth. We use a s...

Where Does Multinational Investment Go with Territorial Taxation? Evidence from the United Kingdom

By Li Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

In 2009, the United Kingdom changed from a worldwide to a territorial tax system, abolishing dividend taxes on foreign repatriation from many low-tax countries. This paper assesses the causal effect of territorial taxation on real investments, using a uni...

Learning Job Skills from Colleagues at Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment Using Teacher Performance Data

By John P. Papay, Eric S. Taylor, John H. Tyler, and Mary E. Laski

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

We study a program designed to encourage learning from coworkers among school teachers. In an experiment, we document gains in job performance when high- and low-skilled teachers are paired and asked to work together on improving their skills. Pairs are m...

Retirement Lock and Prescription Drug Insurance: Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Gal Wettstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

I examine whether lack of an individual market for prescription drug insurance causes individuals to delay retirement. Exploiting the 2006 introduction of Medicare Part D, which subsidized drug insurance for Americans over age 65, I use a triple-differenc...

The Marginal Cost of Traffic Congestion and Road Pricing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Beijing

By Jun Yang, Avralt-Od Purevjav, and Shanjun Li

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Severe traffic congestion is ubiquitous in large urban centers. This paper provides the first causal estimate of the relationship between traffic density and speed and optimal congestion charges using real-time fine-scale traffic data in Beijing. The iden...

Institutional Determinants of Labor Reallocation in Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Tito Boeri and Katherine Terrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The transition process differed in the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and those of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in terms of reallocation of labor real wage, employment and output adjustment. We sift through the theoretical and empirical li...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

Dynamism with Incommensurate Development: The Distinctive Indian Model

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Rohit Lamba and Arvind Subramanian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

India's sequencing of economic and political development has been unusual. In contrast to the West and more recently East Asia, democratization has preceded economic growth. Notwithstanding its unique path, India has grown substantially over the last fo...

Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Devesh Kapur

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The Indian state's performance spans the spectrum from woefully inadequate, especially in core public goods provision, to surprisingly impressive in successfully managing complex tasks and on a massive scale. It has delivered better on macroeconomic rat...

The Great Indian Demonetization

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Amartya Lahiri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

On November 8, 2016, India demonetized 86 percent of its currency in circulation. The stated objectives of the move were to seize undeclared income, to destroy counterfeit currency, to speed up formalization of the economy, and to increase the tax base. I...

The Great Divide and Beyond: Financial Architecture in Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Erik Berglof and Patrick Bolton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The Great Divide in economic and financial development and the convergence in financial architecture among the successful countries raise fundamental questions about how financial development interacts with economic growth. Is it possible to engineer a de...

Asylum Migration to the Developed World: Persecution, Incentives, and Policy

[Symposium: Assimilation of Refugees]

By Timothy J. Hatton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The European migration crisis of 2015-2016 and the migrants from Central America gathering on the US border since 2017 have created headlines and presented challenges for Western governments. In this paper, I examine the trends in, and determinants of, th...

The Labor Market Integration of Refugee Migrants in High-Income Countries

[Symposium: Assimilation of Refugees]

By Courtney Brell, Christian Dustmann, and Ian Preston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

We provide an overview of the integration of refugees into the labor markets of a number of high-income countries. Discussing the ways in which refugees and economic migrants are differently selected and so might be expected to perform differently in a ...

Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?

[Symposium: Electricity in Developing Countries]

By Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel, and Catherine Wolfram

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

In recent years, electrification has reemerged as a key priority in low-income countries, with a particular focus on electrifying households. Yet the microeconomic literature examining the impacts of electrifying households on economic development has p...

The Consequences of Treating Electricity as a Right

[Symposium: Electricity in Developing Countries]

By Robin Burgess, Michael Greenstone, Nicholas Ryan, and Anant Sudarshan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

This paper seeks to explain why billions of people in developing countries either have no access to electricity or lack a reliable supply. We present evidence that these shortfalls are a consequence of electricity being treated as a right and that this ...