The Productivity Slowdown, the Oil Shocks, and the Real Cycle

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Mancur Olson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Five facts stand out about economic performance in the United States since World War II. The first is that, for most of the postwar period, the U.S. has had a slower rate of economic growth than the other major developed democracies except Great Britain, ...

Inflation and Price Adjustments: Micro Evidence from Norwegian Consumer Prices 1975-2004

By Fredrik Wulfsberg

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

This is the first paper documenting the frequency and size of price adjustments using micro data from both the high-inflation period in the 1970s and 1980s, and the period of low inflation since the early 1990s. When inflation is high and volatile, prices...

The Journal of Economic Perspectives at 100 (Issues)

[Symposium: 100 Issues of JEP]

By David Autor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

When I was a graduate student, I discovered that the Journal of Economic Perspectives embodied much of what I love about the field of economics: the clarity that pierces rhetoric to seek the core of a question; the rigor to identify the causal re...

2017 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 13, 2017

Economists tackled gender issues, education, globalization, and more.

Competence Implies Credibility

By Giuseppe Moscarini

American Economic Review, March 2007

The (reputation for) competence of a central bank at doing its job makes monetary policy under discretion credible and transparent. Based on its reading of the state of the economy, the central bank announces its policy intentions to the public in a ch...

Excessive Financing Costs in a Representative Agent Framework

By Maya Eden

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2016

This paper highlights a pecuniary externality that results in excessive financing costs. Firms borrow to finance purchases of an inelastically supplied input, bidding up its price. Since higher input prices necessitate more debt obligations, this leads to...

Testing for Indeterminacy: An Application to U.S. Monetary Policy: Comment

By Andreas Beyer and Roger E. A. Farmer

American Economic Review, March 2007

Conditional Retrospective Voting in Large Elections

By Ignacio Esponda and Demian Pouzo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

We introduce a solution concept in the context of large elections with private information by embedding a model of boundedly rational voters into an otherwise standard equilibrium setting. A retrospective voting equilibrium (RVE) formalizes the idea that ...

Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time

By Charles I. Jones and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, September 2016

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-c...

Optimal Expectations and Limited Medical Testing: Evidence from Huntington Disease

By Emily Oster, Ira Shoulson, and E. Ray Dorsey

American Economic Review, April 2013

We use novel data to study genetic testing among individuals at risk for Huntington disease (HD), a hereditary disease with limited life expectancy. Although genetic testing is perfectly predictive and carries little economic cost, presymptomatic testi...

Ex Ante Policy Evaluation, Structural Estimation and Model Selection

By Kenneth I. Wolpin

American Economic Review, May 2007

Why Do Firms Have "Purpose"? The Firm's Role as a Carrier of Identity and Reputation

By Rebecca Henderson and Eric Van den Steen

American Economic Review, May 2015

This article develops a theory in which a firm's adoption of a prosocial purpose can increase profitability by strengthening employees' reputation and identity—leading to higher effort and lower wages—as long as implementing purpose is costly ...

Gender Differences in the Allocation of Low-Promotability Tasks: The Role of Backlash

By Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines whether backlash exacerbates gender differences in time spent on low-promotability tasks. We ask whether gender differences found in previous research--women receiving more requests than men to do these tasks and women being more likel...

Community Networks and the Process of Development

[Symposium: Social Networks]

By Kaivan Munshi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2014

My objective in this paper is to lay the groundwork for a new network-based theory of economic development. The first step is to establish that community-based networks are active throughout the developing world. Plenty of anecdotal and descriptive eviden...

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Samantha Bennett

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850: Review Essay

By Gregory Clark

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

The British Industrial Revolution is the key break in world history. Yet the timing, location, and cause of this Revolution are unsolved puzzles. Joel Mokyr's book is one of a number of recent attempted solutions. He explains the Industrial Revolution thr...

Physician Agency and Adoption of Generic Pharmaceuticals

By Toshiaki Iizuka

American Economic Review, October 2012

I examine physician agency in health care services in the context of the choice between brand-name and generic pharmaceuticals. I examine micro-panel data from Japan, where physicians can legally make profits by prescribing and dispensing drugs. The resul...

Platform Competition under Asymmetric Information

By Hanna Halaburda and Yaron Yehezkel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

We consider platform competition in a two-sided market, where the two sides (buyers and sellers) have ex-ante uncertainty and ex-post asymmetric information concerning the value of a new technology. We find that platform competition may lead to a market...

Corruption in Procurement and the Political Cycle in Tunneling: Evidence from Financial Transactions Data

By Maxim Mironov and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

We provide evidence of corruption in allocation of public procurement and assess its efficiency. Firms with procurement revenue increase tunneling around regional elections, whereas neither tunneling of firms without procurement revenue, nor legitimate...

Endogenous Skill Acquisition and Export Manufacturing in Mexico

By David Atkin

American Economic Review, August 2016

This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms (the years 1986 to 2000) altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across commut...