Solo Self-Employment and Alternative Work Arrangements: A Cross-Country Perspective on the Changing Composition of Jobs

By Tito Boeri, Giulia Giupponi, Alan B. Krueger, and Stephen Machin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work and alternative work arrangements....

The Economics of Maps

By Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long ...

Emi Nakamura: 2019 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Janice Eberly and Michael Woodford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

Emi Nakamura is the 2019 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. Emi is an empirical macroeconomist whose work has studied the nature of price-setting and the effects of monetary and fiscal policies, among other iss...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

Competition and Corporate Governance in Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Saul Estrin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

This paper examines the elements of institutional development critical to the enhancement of company performance in transition economies. This includes initial conditions, forms of privatization, institutional frameworks and the competitiveness of markets...

Environmental Policy Since Earth Day I: What Have We Gained?

By A. Myrick Freeman III

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

I review the data on costs and benefits of the major environmental laws passed during the 1970s. The winners in terms of benefit-cost analysis include: getting lead out of gasoline; controlling particulate air pollution; reducing the concentration of lead...

Confronting the Environmental Kuznets Curve

By Susmita Dasgupta, Benoit Laplante, Hua Wang, and David Wheeler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The environmental Kuznets curve posits an inverted-U relationship between pollution and economic development. Pessimistic critics of empirically estimated curves have argued that their declining portions are illusory, either because they are cross-section...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

The Relation between Behavior under Risk and over Time

By Anujit Chakraborty, Yoram Halevy, and Kota Saito

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

The paper establishes a tight relation between nonstandard behaviors in the domains of risk and time, by considering a decision-maker with non-expected utility preferences who believes that only present consumption is certain while any future consumption ...

Attention Management

By Elliot Lipnowski, Laurent Mathevet, and Dong Wei

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Attention costs can cause some information to be ignored and decisions to be imperfect. Can we improve the material welfare of a rationally inattentive agent by restricting his information in the first place? In our model, a well-intentioned principal pro...

Monopsony in Online Labor Markets

By Arindrajit Dube, Jeff Jacobs, Suresh Naidu, and Siddharth Suri

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Despite the seemingly low switching and search costs of on-demand labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find substantial monopsony power, as measured by the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer). We isolate plausibly exogenous...

Trade Liberalization and Mortality: Evidence from US Counties

By Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

We investigate the impact of a large and persistent economic shock on "deaths of despair." We find that areas more exposed to a plausibly exogenous change in international trade policy exhibit relative increases in fatal drug overdoses, specifically among...

Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

By Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. Integrating administrative data on firms, workers, and owners, we study start-ups systematically in the United States and find th...

Tax Policy and Local Labor Market Behavior

By Daniel G. Garrett, Eric Ohrn, and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Since 2002, the US government has encouraged business investment using accelerated depreciation policies that significantly reduce investment costs. We provide the first in-depth analysis of this stimulus on employment and earnings. Our local labor market...

Jobs and Matches: Quits, Replacement Hiring, and Vacancy Chains

By Yusuf Mercan and Benjamin Schoefer

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

In the canonical DMP model of job openings, all job openings stem from new job creation. Jobs denote worker-firm matches, which are destroyed following worker quits. Yet, employers classify 56 percent of vacancies as quit-driven replacement hiring into ol...

Do Immigrants Assimilate More Slowly Today Than in the Past?

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Using millions of historical census records and modern birth certificates, we document that immigrants assimilated into US society at similar rates in the past and present. We measure cultural assimilation as immigrants giving their children less foreign ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2020

What Really Matters in Auction Design

By Paul Klemperer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy-preventing collusive, predatory, and entry-deterring behavior. Ascending and uniform-price auctions are particularly vulnerable to these problems. The Anglo-Dut...

The Welfare Effects of Social Media

By Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow

American Economic Review, March 2020

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks befo...

Dominant Currency Paradigm

By Gita Gopinath, Emine Boz, Camila Casas, Federico J. Díez, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

American Economic Review, March 2020

We propose a "dominant currency paradigm" with three key features: dominant currency pricing, pricing complementarities, and imported inputs in production. We test this paradigm using a new dataset of bilateral price and volume indices for more than 2,5...