Affirmative Action and Its Mythology

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Glenn C. Loury

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

For more than three decades, critics and supporters of affirmative action have fought for the moral high ground through ballot initiatives and lawsuits, in state legislatures, and in varied courts of public opinion. The goal of this paper is to show the c...

Collective Dynamic Choice: The Necessity of Time Inconsistency

By Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, every Pareto efficient and non-dictatorial method of aggregating utility functions must be time-in...

The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital

By Charles I. Jones and Paul M. Romer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

In 1961, Nicholas Kaldor highlighted six "stylized" facts to summarize the patterns that economists had discovered in national income accounts and to shape the growth models being developed to explain them. Redoing this exercise today shows just how much...

Selection into Trade and Wage Inequality

By Thomas Sampson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2014

This paper analyzes how intra-industry trade affects the wage distribution when both workers and firms are heterogeneous. Positive assortative matching between worker skill and firm technology generates an employer size-wage premium and an exporter wage p...

Stress and Birth Weight: Evidence from Terrorist Attacks

By Adriana Camacho

American Economic Review, May 2008

The Gains from Pension Reform

By Assar Lindbeck and Mats Persson

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003

We classify social security pension systems in three dimensions: actuarial versus non-actuarial, funded versus unfunded, and defined-benefit versus defined-contribution systems. Recent pension reforms are discussed in terms of these dimensions. Shifting t...

Dynamic Inefficiencies in an Employment-Based Health Insurance System: Theory and Evidence

By Hanming Fang and Alessandro Gavazza

American Economic Review, December 2011

We investigate the effects of the institutional settings of the US health care system on individuals' life-cycle medical expenditures. Health is a form of general human capital; labor turnover and labor-market frictions prevent an employer-employee pair ...

Wage Risk and Employment Risk over the Life Cycle

By Hamish Low, Costas Meghir, and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, September 2010

We specify a life-cycle model of consumption, labor supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions. We distinguish different sources of risk, including shocks to productivity, job arrival, and job destruction. Allowing for job mobility has a ...

What Drives US Foreign Borrowing? Evidence on the External Adjustment to Transitory and Permanent Shocks

By Giancarlo Corsetti and Panagiotis T. Konstantinou

American Economic Review, April 2012

The joint dynamics of US net output, consumption, and (the market value of) foreign assets and liabilities, characterized empirically following Lettau and Ludvigson (2004), is shown to be consistent with current account theory. US consumption is virtually...

Revolving Door Lobbyists

By Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca, and Christian Fons-Rosen

American Economic Review, December 2012

Washington's "revolving door"—the movement from government service into the lobbying industry—is regarded as a major concern for policy-making. We study how ex-government staffers benefit from the personal connections acquired during their pub...

Erratum: Macroeconomic Effects of Financial Shocks

By Urban Jermann and Vincenzo Quadrini

American Economic Review, April 2012

Multiproduct Quality Competition: Fighting Brands and Product Line Pruning

By Justin P. Johnson and David P. Myatt

American Economic Review, June 2003

Firms selling multiple quality-differentiated products frequently alter their product lines when a competitor enters the market. We present a model of multiproduct monopoly and duopoly using a general "upgrades" approach that yields a powerful analytical ...

Make Versus Buy in Trucking: Asset Ownership, Job Design, and Information

By George P. Baker and Thomas N. Hubbard

American Economic Review, June 2003

Explaining patterns of asset ownership is a central goal of both organizational economics and industrial organization. We develop a model of asset ownership in trucking, which we test by examining how the adoption of different classes of on-board computer...

Socioeconomic Status and Child Health: Why Is the Relationship Stronger for Older Children?

By Janet Currie and Mark Stabile

American Economic Review, December 2003

Deposit Competition and Financial Fragility: Evidence from the US Banking Sector

By Mark Egan, Ali Hortaçsu, and Gregor Matvos

American Economic Review, January 2017

We develop a structural empirical model of the US banking sector. Insured depositors and run-prone uninsured depositors choose between differentiated banks. Banks compete for deposits and endogenously default. The estimated demand for uninsured deposits d...

The Vulcanization of the Human Brain: A Neural Perspective on Interactions Between Cognition and Emotion

[Symposium: Cognition, Brain Science and Economics]

By Jonathan D. Cohen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Emotions may explain inconsistencies in human behavior and forms of behavior that some have deemed irrational, though such behavior may seem more sensible after a discussion of the functions that emotions serve—or may have once served in our evolutionar...

Wage Dispersion in the Search and Matching Model

By Dale T. Mortensen

American Economic Review, May 2010

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2015

Driving under the (Cellular) Influence

By Saurabh Bhargava and Vikram S. Pathania

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We investigate the causal link between driver cell phone use and crash rates by exploiting a natural experiment induced by the 9 pm price discontinuity that characterizes a majority of recent cellular plans. We first document a 7.2 percent jump in driver ...

Economics in the Former Soviet Union

By Michael Alexeev, Clifford Gaddy, and Jim Leitzel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

One of the most notable, but least discussed, aspects of the halting attempts during the past six years to reform the economies of the Soviet Union, and now those of its successor states, has been the prominent role played by professional economists. Not ...