Are Cities Dying?

[Symposium: Urban Agglomeration]

By Edward L. Glaeser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

This paper organizes a discussion of the costs and benefits of cities around the question: Are cities becoming obsolete? While minimizing transport costs for manufactured goods no longer justifies the existence of cities, they still facilitate the divisio...

Research on Teaching Economics to Undergraduates

By Sam Allgood, William B. Walstad, and John J. Siegfried

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2015

This survey summarizes the main research findings about teaching economics to undergraduates. After briefly reviewing the history of research on undergraduate economic education, it discusses the status of the economics major numbers and trends, goals, co...

Forty Years of Oil Price Fluctuations: Why the Price of Oil May Still Surprise Us

[Symposium: Oil and Gas Markets]

By Christiane Baumeister and Lutz Kilian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

It has been 40 years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent years, a large literature on the economic determinants o...

Profit with Purpose? A Theory of Social Enterprise

By Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

When social benefits cannot be measured, an organization that selects managers based on pro-social motivation can be used to balance profits with a social purpose. This paper develops a model of social enterprise based on selection of citizen-managers to ...

Implications of the U.S. Current Account Deficit

By David H. Howard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

In 1988, the United States recorded a deficit of about $135 billion on the current account of its balance of payments with the rest of the world. This paper presents an analytical framework for thinking about the current account deficit, explores causes o...

Discrepancies in International Data: An Application to China-Hong Kong Entrepot Trade

By Robert C. Feenstra, Wen Hai, Wing T. Woo, and Shunli Yao

American Economic Review, May 1999

Overlapping Generations: The First Jubilee

By Philippe Weil

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Paul Samuelson's (1958) overlapping generations model has turned 50. Seldom has so simple a model been so influential. The paper, in spite of its ripe age, still elicits wonder. Starting from the uncontroversial observation that "we live in a world where ...

Market Impacts of a Nuclear Power Plant Closure

By Lucas Davis and Catherine Hausman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

Falling revenues and rising costs have put US nuclear plants in financial trouble, and some threaten to close. To understand the potential private and social consequences, we examine the abrupt closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) ...

The Economics of Rights: Does the Right to Counsel Increase Crime?

By Itai Ater, Yehonatan Givati, and Oren Rigbi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

We examine the broad consequences of the right to counsel by exploiting a legal reform in Israel that extended the right to publicly provided legal counsel to suspects in arrest proceedings. Using the staggered regional rollout of the reform, we find that...

Recovery from Financial Crises: Evidence from 100 Episodes

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, May 2014

We examine the evolution of real per capita GDP around 100 systemic banking crises. Part of the costs of these crises owes to the protracted nature of recovery. On average, it takes about 8 years to reach the pre-crisis level of income; the median is abou...

Survey Measures of Expected U.S. Inflation

By Lloyd B. Thomas

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

The forecasting performance of widely accessible surveys of expected inflation are evaluated against naive and financial market benchmark forecasts. In the period of rising inflation (1960-80), the Michigan household consensus forecasts exhibited smaller ...

Can Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?

By David Card and Laura Giuliano

American Economic Review, October 2016

We evaluate a tracking program in a large urban district where schools with at least one gifted fourth grader create a separate "gifted/high achiever" classroom. Most seats are filled by non-gifted high achievers, ranked by previous-year test scores. We s...

The Limits of Price Discrimination

By Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, March 2015

We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers' tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry ou...

Social Psychology, Unemployment and Macroeconomics

By William A. Darity and Arthur H. Goldsmith

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

In a conventional macroeconomic model, following a policy change, as nominal wages adjust the economy returns to its original real levels of employment, output, and unemployment. This description of events ignores the social psychological consequences of ...

Herd Behavior and Investment: Reply

By David S. Scharfstein and Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Review, June 2000

The Role of Economics in Climate Change Policy

By Warwick J. McKibbin and Peter J. Wilcoxen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

The most important characteristic of climate change as a policy problem is uncertainty. From climatology to economics, uncertainties are pervasive, large and difficult to resolve. However, the economic theory of environmental policy under uncertainty prov...

What Makes US Government Bonds Safe Assets?

By Zhiguo He, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Konstantin Milbradt

American Economic Review, May 2016

US government bonds are considered to be the world's safe store of value, especially during periods of economic turmoil such as the events of 2008. But what makes US government bonds "safe assets"? We highlight coordination among investors, and build a mo...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?

By Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Malečková

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

The paper investigates whether there is a connection between poverty or low education and terrorism. We review evidence on hate crimes, which are closely related to terrorism; the occurrence of hate crimes is largely independent of economic conditions. We...

Policy Watch: The Economics of Fuel Economy Standards

By Paul R. Portney, Ian W.H. Parry, Howard K. Gruenspecht, and Winston Harrington

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2003

One of the most hotly contested of all energy policy issues involves Corporate Average Fuel Economy (or CAFE) standards for new cars and light-duty trucks. Tighter standards would reduce gasoline consumption, and hence both greenhouse gas emissions as wel...