Intelligence Failures: An Organizational Economics Perspective

By Luis Garicano and Richard A. Posner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Two recent failures of the U.S. intelligence system have led to the creation of high-level investigative commissions. The failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11 prompted the creation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the Unite...

Oil for What?-Illicit Iraqi Oil Contracts and the U.N. Security Council

By Paul Heaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

The Oil-For-Food program was established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 986 in 1995 as a means of providing humanitarian relief to Iraq, which had been under U.N. economic sanctions since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. After the invasion of ...

Winning Isn't Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling

By Mark Duggan and Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Review, December 2002

Portfolio Choice and Trading in a Large 401(k) Plan

By Julie Agnew, Pierluigi Balduzzi, and Annika Sundén

American Economic Review, March 2003

We study nearly 7,000 retirement accounts during the April 1994-August 1998 period. Several interesting patterns emerge. Most asset allocations are extreme (either 100 percent or zero percent in equities) and there is inertia in asset allocations. Equity ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Comments

By Lawrence H. Goulder, Ian W.H. Parry, and Roberton C. Williams III

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

Some Uses of Happiness Data in Economics

[Symposium: Happiness Economics]

By Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Happiness research is based on the idea that it is fruitful to study empirical measures of individual welfare. The most common is the answer to a simple well-being question such as "Are you Happy?" Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been asked this...

Poverty in America: Trends and Explanations

[Symposium: Poverty]

By Hilary W. Hoynes, Marianne E. Page, and Ann Huff Stevens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Despite robust growth in real GDP per capita in the last three decades, U.S. poverty rates have changed very little. We summarize some basic facts about poverty in the United States, relying on a combination of previously published data from the Census Bu...

Poor People in Rich Nations: The United States in Comparative Perspective

[Symposium: Poverty]

By Timothy Smeeding

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Cross-national comparisons can teach lessons about antipoverty policy. While all nations value low poverty, high levels of economic self-reliance and equality of opportunity for younger persons, they differ dramatically in the extent to which they reach t...

Addressing Absence

[Symposium: Public Sector Absenteeism]

By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper p...

Anomalies: Utility Maximization and Experienced Utility

By Daniel Kahneman and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

In this column, we discuss a version of the utility maximization hypothesis that can be tested—and we find that it is false. We review empirical challenges to utility maximization, which return to the old question of whether preferences optimize the exp...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Delegated Monitors, Large and Small: Germany's Banking System, 1800-1914

By Timothy W. Guinnane

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

Banks play a greater role in the German financial system than in those of the United States or Britain. Germany's large universal banks are admired by those who advocate bank deregulation in the United States. Others admire the universal banks for their s...

Looking Inside the Labor Market: A Review Article

By Peter Howitt

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

When unemployed workers are available, why don't firms cut wages until the excess supply is eliminated? In his book, Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession, Truman F. Bewley concludes, based on interviews with managers and labor leaders, that the most im...

Can We Trust Social Capital?

By Joel Sobel

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

This essay looks at the literature on social capital from the perspective of game theory. It reviews Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam and Social Capital: A Multifaceted Approach edited by Partha Dasgupta and Ismail Serageldin.

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review

By Shane Frederick, George Loewenstein, and Ted O'Donoghue

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

This paper discusses the discounted utility (DU) model: its historical development, underlying assumptions, and "anomalies" - the empirical regularities that are inconsistent with its theoretical predictions. We then summarize the alternate theoretical fo...

Schools and Skills in Developing Countries: Education Policies and Socioeconomic Outcomes

By Paul Glewwe

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

This paper reviews recent research on the determinants of educational outcomes, and the impact of those outcomes on other socioeconomic phenomena. It addresses three questions: 1) What school policies are most cost-effective in producing students with par...