Reflections on 25 Years of CSWEP

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Here, we republish the text of the resolution that created CSWEP, along with comments on the role of CSWEP in the economics profession from Robin L....

Executive Compensation: Six Questions That Need Answering

By John M. Abowd and David S. Kaplan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

This article address six questions concerning executive compensation, drawing on recent advances in the study of executive compensation, including the role of stock and option holdings: How much does executive compensation cost the firm? How much is execu...

The Doing Business Project: How It Started: Correspondence

By Simeon Djankov

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development?

By Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the me...

Takeovers: Their Causes and Consequences

[Symposium: Takeovers]

By Michael C. Jensen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

Economists have accumulated considerable evidence and knowledge on the effects of the takeover market. Here, I focus on current aspects of the controversy. My assessment is that the market for corporate control is creating large benefits for shareholders ...

Welfare Cost of Business Cycles with Idiosyncratic Consumption Risk and a Preference for Robustness

By Martin Ellison and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2015

The welfare cost of random consumption fluctuations is known from De Santis (2007) to be increasing in the level of uninsured idiosyncratic consumption risk. It is known from Barillas, Hansen, and Sargent (2009) to increase if agents care about robustness...

Do Child Tax Benefits Affect the Well-Being of Children? Evidence from Canadian Child Benefit Expansions

By Kevin Milligan and Mark Stabile

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

We exploit changes in child benefits in Canada to study the impact of family income on child and family well-being. Using variation in child benefits across province, time, and family type, we study outcomes spanning test scores, mental health, physical h...

Understanding Bubbly Episodes

By Vasco M. Carvalho, Alberto Martin, and Jaume Ventura

American Economic Review, May 2012

Over the last two decades US aggregate wealth has fluctuated substantially. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, the effects of these boom-and-bust cycles have come to dominate academic and policy discussions. How can we explain these fluctuations...

Economic Forecasting

By Graham Elliott and Allan Timmermann

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2008

Forecasts guide decisions in all areas of economics and finance and their value can only be understood in relation to, and in the context of, such decisions. We discuss the central role of the loss function in helping determine the forecaster's objectiv...

Decentralization, Hierarchies, and Incentives: A Mechanism Design Perspective

By Dilip Mookherjee

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2006

Separation of ownership from management, multidivisional firm organizations, delegation of production decisions to worker teams, delegation of pricing and advertising decisions to retail franchisers, reliance on intermediaries in trade or finance, and d...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

The Role of Unemployment in the Rise in Alternative Work Arrangements

By Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Review, May 2017

The share of U.S. workers in alternative work arrangements has increased substantially in recent decades. Micro longitudinal analyses show that unemployed workers are much more likely to transition into alternative work arrangements than other workers. Ma...

Do Expert Reviews Affect the Demand for Wine?

By Richard Friberg and Erik Grönqvist

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

We examine the demand for wines in Sweden using five years of weekly data on sales, advertising, and expert reviews. The effect of a favorable review peaks in the week after publication with an increase in demand of 6 percent, and the effect remains signi...

Voting on the Budget Deficit: Comment

By Ben D. Peletier, Robert A. J. Dur, and Otto H. Swank

American Economic Review, December 1999

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Should America Save for Its Old Age? Fiscal Policy, Population Aging, and National Saving

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Douglas W. Elmendorf and Louise M. Sheiner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

We examine whether the aging of the U.S. population adds force to traditional arguments for boosting national saving and conclude--perhaps surprisingly--that it may not. Aging boosts the demands on future resources, but it also changes the rate of return ...

Partisan Grading

By Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

We study grading outcomes associated with professors in an elite university in the United States who were identified—using voter registration records from the county where the university is located—as either Republicans or Democrats. The evide...

Loss Aversion and Consumption Choice: Theory and Experimental Evidence

By Heiko Karle, Georg Kirchsteiger, and Martin Peitz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We analyze a consumer-choice model with price uncertainty, loss aversion, and expectation-based reference points. The implications of this model are tested in an experiment in which participants have to make a consumption choice between two sandwiches. Pa...

Monetary Commitment and Fiscal Discretion: The Optimal Policy Mix

By Stefano Gnocchi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2013

We study a noncooperative policy game between monetary and fiscal policy, where only monetary policy can commit to future actions. The equilibrium outcome of the game depends on the strategies available to the monetary policymaker. If strategies are le...

The Cyclical Volatility of Labor Markets under Frictional Financial Markets

By Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau and Etienne Wasmer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

We provide a dynamic extension of an economy with search on credit and labor markets (Wasmer and Weil 2004). Financial frictions create volatility. They add an additional, almost acyclical, entry cost to procyclical job creation costs, thus increasing ...