Buy the Book? Evidence on the Effect of Textbook Funding on School-Level Achievement

By Kristian L. Holden

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

This paper considers the effect of textbook funding on school-level test performance by using a quasi-experimental setting in the United States. I consider a lawsuit in California that provided a one-time payment of $96.90 per student for textbooks if sch...

Dodging the Taxman: Firm Misreporting and Limits to Tax Enforcement

By Paul Carrillo, Dina Pomeranz, and Monica Singhal

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

Reducing tax evasion is a priority for many governments. A growing literature argues that verifying taxpayer reports against third-party information is critical for tax collection. However, effectiveness can be limited when tax authorities face constraint...

Cash for Corollas: When Stimulus Reduces Spending

By Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller, and Jeremy West

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which experienced disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regress...

Robert Solow: An Affectionate Portrait

By Paul A. Samuelson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

Solow is the consummate economist's economist. He does everything well and with apparent ease. What Ty Cobb was to baseball, Solow has been to our generation of economists. But with this difference: Cobb had a will to win that never let up. Solow acts as ...

Hot and Cold Seasons in the Housing Market

By L. Rachel Ngai and Silvana Tenreyro

American Economic Review, December 2014

Every year housing markets in the United Kingdom and the United States experience systematic above-trend increases in prices and transactions during the spring and summer ("hot season") and below-trend falls during the autumn and winter ("cold season")...

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Samantha Bennett

American Economic Review, May 2012

Repugnance Management and Transactions in the Body

By Kieran Healy and Kimberly D. Krawiec

American Economic Review, May 2017

Researchers have made progress in understanding the role of repugnance in transactions involving the human body. Yet, often, the focus remains on exchange between individuals and how they mentally cope (or not) with repugnance. But these exchanges also en...

Perspectives on Growth Theory

[Symposium: New Growth Theory]

By Robert M. Solow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

This essay relates recent developments in growth theory to problems and ideas that first engaged R. F. Harrod, E. Domar, and their neoclassical successors. The body of 'new growth theory' began by finding special ways to assume that there are constant ret...

Will Aging Baby Boomers Bust the Federal Budget?

By Ronald Lee and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

The authors analyze in three steps the influence of the projected mortality decline on the long-run finances of the Social Security System. First, mortality decline adds person years of life which are distributed across the life cycle. The interaction of ...

Height and Economic Development in Italy, 1730-1980

By Franco Peracchi

American Economic Review, May 2008

Homophily in Peer Groups

By Mariagiovanna Baccara and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. In our model agents choose peers before making contributions to public projects, and they differ in how much they value one project relative to another. Thus, the group's preference compo...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: Chicago, IL, April 24, 2009

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit: Reply

By Gordon B. Dahl and Lance Lochner

American Economic Review, February 2017

Dahl and Lochner (2012) provides some of the first causal evidence of the effects of family income on child achievement using changes in the Earned Income Tax Credit. Unfortunately, a coding error in the creation of total family income affects the first s...

Retrospectives: Fixed Capital, Railroad Economics and the Critique of the Market

By Michael Perelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

Where average fixed costs are large compared to marginal costs, competition will drive industry into bankruptcy. During the last century, the chaos that competition created within the railroad industry caused many prominent U.S. economists to reject the m...

Can the West Save Africa?

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort toward Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts ...

Market and Public Liquidity

By Patrick Bolton, Tano Santos, and Jose A. Scheinkman

American Economic Review, May 2009

Is It Too Late to Bail Out the Troubled Countries in the Eurozone?

By Juan Carlos Conesa and Timothy J. Kehoe

American Economic Review, May 2014

In January 1995, US President Bill Clinton organized a bailout for Mexico that imposed penalty interest rates and induced the Mexican government to reduce its debt, ending the debt crisis. Can the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, and In...

A Political-Economy Theory of Trade Agreements

By Giovanni Maggi and Andrés Rodríguez-Clare

American Economic Review, September 2007

We present a model where trade agreements are motivated by the desire of governments to commit vis-à-vis domestic lobbies, in addition to standard terms-of-trade externalities. The model predicts that trade liberalization is deeper when capital is...