Tagging and Income Taxation: Theory and an Application

By Helmuth Cremer, Firouz Gahvari, and Jean-Marie Lozachmeur

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

We derive a set of analytical results for optimal income taxation with tags using quasilinear preferences and a Rawlsian social welfare function. Secondly, assuming a constant elasticity of labor supply and log-normality of the skills distribution, we ...

The Stock Market Boom and Crash of 1929 Revisited

[Symposium: Bubbles]

By Eugene N. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

This paper will sort through many of the hypotheses offered to explain the 1929 boom and bust. Most of the factors cited by historians played trivial or insignificant roles. The central issue is whether fundamentals or a bubble drove the bull market upwar...

Symposium on Bubbles

[Symposium: Bubbles]

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

The papers in this symposium represent the divergent views of economists on an important issue: the extent to which prices of assets represent "fundamental" values. While the papers in the symposium present different formal definitions of what a bubble is...

Inflation Targeting: A New Framework for Monetary Policy?

By Ben S. Bernanke and Frederic S. Mishkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

In recent years, a number of industrialized countries have adopted a strategy for monetary policy known as 'inflation targeting.' The authors describe how this approach has been implemented in practice and argue that it is best understood as a broad frame...

News Shocks and the Slope of the Term Structure of Interest Rates: Reply

By André Kurmann and Christopher Otrok

American Economic Review, October 2017

This reply to Cascaldi-Garcia's (2017) comment argues that by using the original code of Kurmann and Otrok (2013) with new data on utilization-adjusted TFP, Cascaldi-Garcia (2017) confounds positive and negative news shocks. With a small modification to t...

Competition and the Strategic Choices of Churches

By Adam D. Rennhoff and Mark F. Owens

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

We examine how the decisions of churches are impacted by the decisions of rival churches. Using a novel dataset, we estimate a model of strategic interaction, which accounts for the location and denomination of churches. We focus on a church's decision of...

Educational Debt Burden and Career Choice: Evidence from a Financial Aid Experiment at NYU Law School

By Erica Field

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

This paper examines the influence of psychological responses to debt on career choices from an experiment in which alternative financial aid packages were assigned by lottery to a set of law school admits. The packages had equivalent monetary value, bu...

The Doctor Might See You Now: The Supply Side Effects of Public Health Insurance Expansions

By Craig L. Garthwaite

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

In the United States, public health insurance programs cover over 90 million individuals. Expansions of these programs, such as the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), may have large effects on physician behavior. This stud...

Speculative Bubbles and Financial Crises

By Pengfei Wang and Yi Wen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

Are asset prices unduly volatile and often detached from their fundamentals? Does the bursting of financial bubbles depress the real economy? This paper addresses these issues by constructing a DSGE model with speculative bubbles. We characterize conditi...

Managing Local Commons: Theoretical Issues in Incentive Design

[Symposium]

By Paul Seabright

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

Local commons encompass a wide range of resources whose shared feature is the need for some form of collective management. In what follows, we shall be concerned mainly with the problems of implementing a collective management plan. Whatever the mechanism...

Option Awareness: The Psychology of What We Consider

By Anuj K. Shah and Jens Ludwig

American Economic Review, May 2016

The standard economic view suggests that people will commit an action if its expected benefits outweigh its costs. But before people weigh the costs and benefits of an action, what affects whether they think of the action in the first place? We argue that...

Network Structure and the Aggregation of Information: Theory and Evidence from Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review, July 2016

We use unique data from over 600 Indonesian communities on what individuals know about the poverty status of others to study how network structure influences information aggregation. We develop a model of semi-Bayesian learning on networks, which we struc...

Self-Enforcing Contracts, Shirking, and Life Cycle Incentives

[Symposium: Seniority and Wages]

By H. Lorne Carmichael

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

The labor market is a rich and complicated place. When a worker takes a job he expects to earn a wage, but will also care about rates of wage growth, fringe benefits, levels of risk, retirement practices, pensions, promotion and layoff rules, seniority ri...

Civil War

By Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. Yet while civil war is central to many nations' development, it has stood at the periphery of economics research and teaching. The past decade has witnessed a long overdue explosion o...

Will the New Keynesian Macroeconomics Resurrect the IS-LM Model?

[Symposium: Keynesian Economics Today]

By Robert G. King

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

The IS-LM model has no greater prospect of being a viable analytical vehicle for macroeconomics in the 1990s than the Ford Pinto has of being a sporty, reliable car for the 1990s. Because of its treatment of expectations, the IS-LM model, as traditionally...

Measuring Investment in Education

[Symposium: Primary and Secondary Education]

By Eric A. Hanushek

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

Historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital. As extensive research demonstrates, education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and ...

Uncertainty at the Zero Lower Bound

By Taisuke Nakata

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

When the policy rate is at the zero lower bound (ZLB), an increase in uncertainty regarding the future path of exogenous shocks alters the conditional expectations of relevant prices facing households and firms. Accordingly, an increase in uncertainty alt...

Uncertainty and the Dynamics of R&D

By Nick Bloom

American Economic Review, May 2007

Group Polarization in a Model of Information Aggregation

By Nicolas Roux and Joel Sobel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

Experiments identify the empirical regularity that groups tend to make decisions that are more extreme, but in the same direction as the tendency of individual members of the group. We present a model of information aggregation consistent with these findi...

Economic Shocks and Conflict: Evidence from Commodity Prices

By Samuel Bazzi and Christopher Blattman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

Higher national incomes are correlated with political stability. Is this relationship causal? We test three theories linking income to conflict with new data on export price shocks. Price shocks have no effect on new conflict, even large shocks in high...