Management Practices, Relational Contracts, and the Decline of General Motors

[Symposium: Manufacturing]

By Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

General Motors was once regarded as the best-managed and most successful firm in the world. However, between 1980 and 2009, GM's US market share fell from 46 to 20 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. We argue that the conventional explanation f...

Income Opportunities and Sea Piracy in Indonesia: Evidence from Satellite Data

By Sebastian Axbard

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

The effect of climatic variation on conflict and crime is well established, but less is known about the mechanism through which this effect operates. This study contributes to the literature by exploiting a new source of exogenous variation in climate to...

Rethinking Protection of Those Displaced by Humanitarian Crises

By Susan F. Martin

American Economic Review, May 2016

In June 2015, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced a landmark event in the history of his organization. UNHCR estimated that there were more refugees and displaced persons than it had counted since its establishment in 1950--almost 60 million w...

Advancing Beyond Advances in Behavioral Economics

By Drew Fudenberg

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2006

This essay discusses the field of behavioral economics, with a focus on the papers in Advances in Behavioral Economics. These papers show that there is a body of “behavioral facts” that is both economically significant and regular enough to be ...

Discovering Diversity in Introductory Economics

By Robin L. Bartlett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Instructors can begin the process of integrating race and gender issues into introductory economics by reexamining their courses with a new lens of diversity. The content of introductory economics can be expanded by 'adding and stirring' race and gender d...

Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence

By Alan S. Blinder, Michael Ehrmann, Marcel Fratzscher, Jakob De Haan, and David-Jan Jansen

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2008

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication—mostly empirical, and almost all of ...

The Window Tax: A Case Study in Excess Burden

By Wallace E. Oates and Robert M. Schwab

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

The window tax provides a dramatic and transparent historical example of the potential distorting effects of taxation. Imposed in England in 1696, the tax—a kind of predecessor of the modern property tax—was levied on dwellings with the tax ...

Commercial Policy in a "Fragmented" World

By Eric W. Bond

American Economic Review, May 2001

Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital? Evidence from Indonesian Villages

By Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2009

This paper investigates the impact of television and radio on social capital in Indonesia. I use two sources of variation in signal reception -- one based on Indonesia's mountainous terrain, and a second based on the differential introduction of priva...

The Marginal Product of Capital, Capital Flows, and Convergence

By Sirsha Chatterjee and Kanda Naknoi

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Quality and Distribution of Teachers under the No Child Left Behind Act

[Symposium: No Child Left Behind]

By Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

The main effects of No Child Left Behind on the quality of teaching are likely to come through two provisions of the act. First, NCLB establishes benchmarks based on test score pass rates that schools must meet in order to remain in good standing and avoi...

Exchange Rate Regimes: Is the Bipolar View Correct?

By Stanley Fischer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

The bipolar or two-corner solution view of exchange rates is that intermediate policy regimes between hard pegs and floating are not sustainable. This paper argues that the proponents of the bipolar view have probably exaggerated their point. The right st...

Offshoring and Wage Inequality: Using Occupational Licensing as a Shifter of Offshoring Costs

By Chiara Criscuolo and Luis Garicano

American Economic Review, May 2010

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Roger Gordon

American Economic Review, May 2009

Competition and Ideological Diversity: Historical Evidence from US Newspapers

By Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, and Michael Sinkinson

American Economic Review, October 2014

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors...

Sticky Prices versus Monetary Frictions: An Estimation of Policy Trade-Offs

By S. Borağan Aruoba and Frank Schorfheide

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

We develop a two-sector monetary model with a centralized and decentralized market. Activities in the centralized market resemble those in a standard New Keynesian economy with price rigidities. In the decentralized market agents engage in bilateral excha...

The Impact of Economic Development on Democracy

[Symposium: Democracy and Development]

By Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and John D. Stephens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

Any account of the social and economic conditions of democracy must come to terms with the central finding of the cross-national statistical research: a sturdy (though not perfect) association between economic development and democracy. To tackle these qu...

The Time-Varying Volatility of Macroeconomic Fluctuations

By Alejandro Justiniano and Giorgio E. Primiceri

American Economic Review, June 2008

We investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of US macroeconomic variables in the postwar period. To this end, we propose the estimation of DSGE models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations....

Endogenous Entry to Security-Bid Auctions

By Takeharu Sogo, Dan Bernhardt, and Tingjun Liu

American Economic Review, November 2016

We endogenize entry to a security-bid auction, where participation is costly and bidders must decide given their private valuations whether to participate. We first consider any minimum reserve security-bid of a fixed expected value that weakly exceeds th...

The Environmental Consequences of Global Reuse

By Thomas Kinnaman and Hide-Fumi Yokoo

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper summarizes a two-country model that solves for optimal tax rates to achieve efficiency in an economy with international trade in used consumer electronics. If only the developed nation can tax the disposal of e-waste, then the global Pareto Opt...