Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals and Misperceptions

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Charles Himmelberg, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

How does one tell when rapid growth in house prices is caused by fundamental factors of supply and demand and when it is an unsustainable bubble? In this paper, we explain how to assess the state of house prices—both whether there is a bubble and what u...

Accounting for Stock Options

[Symposium: Stock Options Now and Then]

By Jeremy Bulow and John B. Shoven

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

As public companies begin their new fiscal years, they are implementing a new and controversial Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB, 2004) proposal for expensing stock options. Applied to 2003 and 2004, this rule would have slashed reported earning...

The Original Management Incentive Schemes

[Symposium: Stock Options Now and Then]

By Richard T. Holden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

During the 1990s, the structure of pay for top corporate executives shifted markedly as the use of stock options greatly expanded. By the early 2000s, as the dot-com boom ended and the Nasdaq stock index melted down, these modern executive incentive schem...

A Natural Experiment in Monetary Policy Covering Three Episodes of Growth and Decline in the Economy and the Stock Market

By Milton Friedman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

The third of three episodes in a major natural experiment in monetary policy that started more than 80 years ago is just now coming to an end. The experiment consists in observing the effect on the economy and the stock market of the monetary policies fol...

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...