Tobacco at the Crossroads: The Past and Future of Smoking Regulation in the United States

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

The past five years have seen a dramatic turn of events against the tobacco industry, raising the question of the appropriate future path for smoking policy in the U.S. This paper discusses the theory and evidence on regulation of smoking. I begin by revi...

Aging in Europe: Reforms, International Diversification, and Behavioral Reactions

By Axel Börsch-Supan, Klaus Härtl, and Alexander Ludwig

American Economic Review, May 2014

The extent of demographic changes in Europe is much more drastic than in the United States. This paper studies the effects of population aging on the interactions between economic growth and living standards in Europe with labor market and pension reform,...

Policy Watch: Cutting Capital Gains Taxes

By Gerald E. Auten and Joseph J. Cordes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

From 1922 to 1986, long-term capital gains were taxed at lower rates than other income, generally by allowing a portion of long-term capital gains to be excluded from taxable income. While taxing capital gains at the same rates as other income has been ha...

On Discrimination in Auctions with Endogenous Entry

By Philippe Jehiel and Laurent Lamy

American Economic Review, August 2015

When entry is exogenous, strong buyers should be discriminated against weak buyers to maximize revenues (Myerson 1981). When entry is endogenous so that entrants' expected payoffs do not depend on the proposed mechanism, optimal discrimination takes a com...

Winter Is Coming: Robert Gordon and the Future of Economic Growth

By Gregory Clark

American Economic Review, May 2016

This comment assesses the claim of The Rise and Fall of American Growth that for coming decades, growth in US TFP will continue the disappointing pace of the last decade. While predicting future technological advance is difficult, there are indic...

Predatory versus Productive Government: The Case of U.S. Agricultural Policies

By Gordon C. Rausser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

This essay will argue that agricultural policy in the United States has led to both the enhancement of efficiency through "productive policies" and the transfer of wealth and income to special interests through redistributive or "predatory policies." Thes...

Wealth Heterogeneity and the Income Elasticity of Migration

By Samuel Bazzi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

How do income shocks affect international migration flows from poor countries? Income growth not only increases the opportunity cost of migration but also eases liquidity constraints. I develop a method to separate these countervailing individual effects ...

The Effect of Bans and Taxes on Passive Smoking

By Jérôme Adda and Francesca Cornaglia

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

We evaluate the effect of smoking bans and excise taxes on the exposure to tobacco smoke of nonsmokers, and we show their unintended consequences on children. Smoking bans perversely increase nonsmokers' exposure by displacing smokers to private places...

School Choice: A Mechanism Design Approach

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, June 2003

A central issue in school choice is the design of a student assignment mechanism. Education literature provides guidance for the design of such mechanisms but does not offer specific mechanisms. The flaws in the existing school choice plans result in appe...

Do Physicians' Financial Incentives Affect Medical Treatment and Patient Health?

By Jeffrey Clemens and Joshua D. Gottlieb

American Economic Review, April 2014

We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts physician payments, generating are...

The Market for College Graduates and the Worldwide Boom in Higher Education of Women

By Gary S. Becker, William H. J. Hubbard, and Kevin M. Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2010

Habit Formation in Consumption and Its Implications for Monetary-Policy Models

By Jeffrey C. Fuhrer

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper explores a monetary-policy model with habit formation for consumers, in which consumers' utility depends in part on current consumption relative to past consumption. The empirical tests developed in the paper show that one can reject the hypoth...

Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries

[Symposium: Public Sector Absenteeism]

By Nazmul Chaudhury, Jeffrey Hammer, Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan, and F. Halsey Rogers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators made unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the f...

The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics

[Symposium: Financial Market Efficiency]

By Burton G. Malkiel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Revolutions often spawn counterrevolutions and the efficient market hypothesis in finance is no exception. The intellectual dominance of the efficient-market revolution has more been challenged by economists who stress psychological and behaviorial elemen...

Equality of Opportunity: Theory and Measurement

By John E. Roemer and Alain Trannoy

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

During the last third of the twentieth century, political philosophers actively debated about the content of distributive justice; the ruling ethical view of utilitarianism was challenged by various versions of equality of opportunities. Economists formul...

Airport Congestion When Carriers Have Market Power

By Jan K. Brueckner

American Economic Review, December 2002

This paper analyzes airport congestion when carriers are nonatomistic, showing how the results of the road-pricing literature are modified when the economic agents causing congestion have market power. The analysis shows that when an airport is dominated ...

How the West "Invented" Fertility Restriction

By Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze the emergence of the first socioeconomic institution in history limiting fertility: west of a line from St. Petersburg to Trieste, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) reduced childbirths by approximately one-third between the fourteenth and ...

Has Economic Analysis Improved Regulatory Decisions?

[Symposium: Regulatory Economics]

By Robert W. Hahn and Paul C. Tetlock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

In response to the increasing impact of regulation, several governments have introduced economic analysis as a way of trying to improve regulatory policy. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of government-supported economic analysis of regulati...

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States since 1850: Comment

By Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald

American Economic Review, August 2013

Using historical census and survey data, Long and Ferrie (2013) found a significant decline in social mobility in the United States from 1880 to 1973. We present two critiques of the Long-Ferrie study. First, the data quality of the Long-Ferrie study is m...

Insiders versus Outsiders

By Assar Lindbeck and Dennis J. Snower

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001