Awards, Success and Aesthetic Quality in the Arts

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Victor Ginsburgh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The role of experts is dramatically increasing in our societies, where sorting information about quality is becoming more and more difficult. This paper looks at expertise in the arts (movies, novels and musical interpretation) and shows that expert opini...

Perspectives from the President's Commission on Social Security Reform

By John F. Cogan and Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Recently we were asked to serve on the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security (CSSS) along with 14 other members drawn equally from both major political parties. The Commission's charge was to provide recommendations to modernize the Social ...

Policy Watch: The Expanding Reach of the Individual Alternative Minimum Tax

By Leonard E. Burman, William G. Gale, and Jeffrey Rohaly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) was designed in 1970 to apply reduce aggressive tax sheltering, but under current law will grow to cover tens of millions of households in the next decade. The growth occurs because the AMT is not indexed for i...

History Lessons: Sanctions - Neither War nor Peace

By Lance Davis and Stanley Engerman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

This paper surveys the increasing international use of sanctions over the past century. Sanctions are a form of action taken by one state or by collective action to influence another state to change its behavior, as a substitute for welfare. They generall...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The Economics and Law of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

By Kaushik Basu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Suppose a firm has a widespread reputation for sexually harassing its employees. When a person signs up to work for such a firm, it would appear that both the firm and the worker are better off by virtue of the "exchange". Is there a case then for governm...

Halving Global Poverty

[Symposium: Global Poverty Reduction]

By Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

The Millennium Development Goals--global targets that the world's leaders set at the Millennium Summit in September 2000--are an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty. As a central plank, these goals include halving the proportion of people living below a...

Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth?

[Symposium: Global Poverty Reduction]

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

The widely publicized finding that "aid promotes growth in a good policy environment" is not robust to the inclusion of new data or alternative definitions of "aid," "policy" or "growth." The idea that "aid buys growth" is on shaky ground theoretically an...

In Honor of Matthew Rabin: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Colin Camerer and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Although there is some evidence that Matthew Rabin existed before 1990, we had the pleasure of discovering him for ourselves when, in the early 1990s, he sent each of us a copy of his manuscript "Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics" [2]....

Retrospectives: Who Invented Instrumental Variable Regression?

By James H. Stock and Francesco Trebbi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

This feature addresses the history of economic words and ideas. The hope is to deepen the workaday dialogue of economists, while perhaps also casting new light on ongoing questions.

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

This section will list readings that may be especially useful to teachers of undergraduate economics, as well as other articles that are of broader cultural interest. In general, the articles chosen will be expository or integrative and not focus on origi...

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Japan's Financial Crisis and Economic Stagnation

[Symposium: Japan's Economy]

By Takeo Hoshi and Anil K. Kashyap

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004

We survey the macroeconomic stagnation and financial problems in Japan. The financial sector assessment includes separate analyses of the commercial banks, the life insurance companies and the government's fiscal investment and loan program (FILP). We est...

Competition in Japan

[Symposium: Japan's Economy]

By Michael E. Porter and Mariko Sakakibara

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004

This article examines competition in Japan and its link to postwar economic prosperity. While Japan's industrial structure and competition policy seem to indicate that competition in Japan has been less intense, the empirical evidence does not support thi...

Do Democracies Have Different Public Policies than Nondemocracies?

[Symposium: Political Economy]

By Casey B. Mulligan, Ricard Gil, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004

Estimates of democracy's effect on the public sector are obtained from comparisons of 142 countries over the years 1960-90. Based on three tenets of voting theory--that voting mutes policy preference intensity, political power is equally distributed in de...

Constitutions and Economic Policy

[Symposium: Political Economy]

By Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004

Rational Choice Theory and the Paradox of Not Voting

[Symposium: Political Economy]

By Timothy J. Feddersen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004