Report of the Secretary for 2008

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2009

Quality Improvement in Health Care: A Framework for Price and Output Measurement

By Irving Shapiro, Matthew D. Shapiro, and David W. Wilcox

American Economic Review, May 1999

Crime and Punishment: And Skin Hue Too?

By Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong and Gregory N. Price

American Economic Review, May 2006

Adding a Stick to the Carrot? The Interaction of Bonuses and Fines

By Ernst Fehr and Klaus M. Schmidt

American Economic Review, May 2007

Adaptation to Climate Change in Preindustrial Iceland

By Matthew A. Turner, Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, Jian Chen, and Chunyan Hao

American Economic Review, May 2012

We investigate the effect of climate change on population growth in 18th and 19th century Iceland. We find that annual temperature changes help determine the population growth rate in pre-industrial Iceland: a year 1 degree Celsius cooler than average dri...

Who Misvotes? The Effect of Differential Cognition Costs on Election Outcomes

By Kelly Shue and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2009

If voters have negligible cognition costs, ballot layout should not affect election outcomes. We explore deviations from rational voting using quasi-random variation in candidate name placement on ballots from the 2003 California recall election. We fi...

Choice Shifts in Groups: A Decision-Theoretic Basis

By Kfir Eliaz, Debraj Ray, and Ronny Razin

American Economic Review, September 2006

The phenomenon of choice shifts in group decision-making has received attention in the social psychology literature. Faced with a risky group decision, individuals appear to support more extreme choices relative to those they would make on their own. This...

A Tale of Two Stimulus Payments: 2001 versus 2008

By Greg Kaplan and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, May 2014

Fiscal stimulus payments (i.e., direct lump-sum payments from the government to households) were used in the recessions of 2001 and 2008 in an attempt to simultaneously alleviate households' economic hardship and stimulate aggregate demand. Despite the si...

The Economic Revolution in the American South

By Gavin Wright

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

As recently as twenty-five years ago, regional economic backwardness in the states of the traditional American South was considered an intractable problem of continuing national concern. Obviously, much has changed since then. The modern period of economi...

What the Change of System from Socialism to Capitalism Does and Does Not Mean

[Symposium: Looking Backward at Economics and the Economy]

By Jànos Kornai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

Fuel Economy, Car Class Mix, and Safety

By Mark R. Jacobsen

American Economic Review, May 2011

Fuel economy standards change the composition of the vehicle fleet, potentially influencing accident fatality risks. I estimate the direction and magnitude of this impact, introducing a correction for selection on driver behavior. A policy application usi...

Symposium on Economists as Policy Advocates

[Symposium: Economists as Policy Advocates]

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

Exclusive Contracts, Innovation, and Welfare

By Yongmin Chen and David E. M. Sappington

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

We extend Philippe Aghion and Patrick Bolton's (1987) classic model to analyze the equilibrium incidence and impact of exclusive contracts in a setting where research and development (R&D) drives industry performance. An exclusive contract between an incu...

Social Reinforcement: Cascades, Entrapment, and Tipping

By Geoffrey Heal and Howard Kunreuther

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as (Harvey) Leibenstein's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differe...

Intrahousehold Allocation of Free and Purchased Mosquito Nets

By Vivian Hoffmann

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Housing Market Impacts of Shale Gas Development: Corrigendum

By Lucija Muehlenbachs, Elisheba Spiller, and Christopher Timmins

American Economic Review, February 2016

Truthful Revelation Mechanisms for Simultaneous Common Agency Games

By Alessandro Pavan and Giacomo Calzolari

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2010

We introduce new revelation mechanisms for simultaneous common agency games which, although they do not always permit a complete equilibrium characterization, do facilitate the characterization of the equilibrium outcomes that are typically of interest in...

A Model-Based Evaluation of the Debate on the Size of the Tax Multiplier

By Ryan Chahrour, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, and Martín Uribe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2012

The SVAR and narrative approaches to estimating tax multipliers deliver significantly different results. The former yields multipliers of about 1 and the latter of about 3. The two approaches differ along two important dimensions: the identification schem...

Anti-Poverty Policy for Families in the Next Century: From Welfare to Work--and Worries

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of the Economy]

By David T. Ellwood

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

This paper reveals that recent changes in social policy have included both sharp cutbacks in welfare for non-working families and dramatic increases in supports for low income working families. It explores the reasons for these changes, and documents how ...