Research on the Economics Profession

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

In this article, I survey some recent contributions to research on the profession, both to bring nonspecialists up to date on what is being done and to inform specialists of other researchers who are doing similar work. The economics profession is interes...

Collateral Damage: Effects of the Japanese Bank Crisis on Real Activity in the United States

By Joe Peek and Eric S. Rosengren

American Economic Review, March 2000

The Japanese banking crisis provides a natural experiment to test whether a loan supply shock can affect real economic activity. Because the shock was external to U.S. credit markets, yet connected through the Japanese bank penetration of U.S. markets, th...

Optimal Taxation and Optimal Tax Systems

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

In its current state, optimal tax theory is incomplete as a guide to action for critical issues in tax policy. It is incomplete because it has not yet come to terms with taxation as a system of coercively collecting revenues from individuals who will tend...

The Private and Public Economics of Renewable Electricity Generation

[Symposium: Energy Challenges]

By Severin Borenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Generating electricity from renewable sources is more expensive than conventional approaches but reduces pollution externalities. Analyzing the tradeoff is much more challenging than often presumed because the value of electricity is extremely dependent ...

Uneven Growth: A Framework for Research in Development Economics

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Debraj Ray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

The textbook paradigm of economywide development rests on the premise of "balanced growth": that is, on the presumption that all sectors will grow in unison over time as a country gets richer. Of course, we would all agree that balanced growth is an abstr...

Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor

By Eric V. Edmonds and Norbert Schady

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

Poor women with children in Ecuador were selected at random for a cash transfer that is less than 20 percent of median child labor earnings. Poor families with children in school at the time of the award use the transfer to postpone the child's entry into...

Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Edward E. Leamer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

My first reaction to "The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics," authored by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, was: Wow! This paper makes a stunningly good case for relying on purposefully randomized or accidentally randomized expe...

Liquidity Constraints and Imperfect Information in Subprime Lending

By William Adams, Liran Einav, and Jonathan Levin

American Economic Review, March 2009

We present new evidence on consumer liquidity constraints and the credit market conditions that might give rise to them. We analyze unique data from a large auto sales company serving the subprime market. Short-term liquidity appears to be a key driver...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2017

Includes "Glenn C. Loury: Distinguished Fellow"

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2016

Reducing Petroleum Consumption from Transportation

[Symposium: Energy Challenges]

By Christopher R. Knittel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

The United States consumes more petroleum-based liquid fuel per capita than any other OECD high-income country—30 percent more than the second-highest country (Canada) and 40 percent more than the third-highest (Luxembourg). The transportation secto...

The End of Cheap Chinese Labor

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Hongbin Li, Lei Li, Binzhen Wu, and Yanyan Xiong

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

In recent decades, cheap labor has played a central role in the Chinese model, which has relied on expanded participation in world trade as a main driver of growth. At the beginning of China's economic reforms in 1978, the annual wage of a Chinese urban ...

Urban-Biased Policies and Rising Income Inequality in China

By Dennis Tao Yang

American Economic Review, May 1999

Income-Induced Expenditure Switching

By Rudolfs Bems and Julian di Giovanni

American Economic Review, December 2016

This paper shows that an income effect can drive expenditure switching between domestic and imported goods. We use a unique Latvian scanner-level dataset, covering the 2008-2009 crisis, to document several empirical findings. First, expenditure switching ...

The When, the How and the Why of Mathematical Expression in the History of Economic Analysis

By Philip Mirowski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

In writings about the history of the use of mathematical expression in economics, there seems to be a conviction that the movement towards its current flowering was cumulative, inevitable, and indeed, natural. While, such notions are widely held among pra...

Feedback Effects, Asymmetric Trading, and the Limits to Arbitrage

By Alex Edmans, Itay Goldstein, and Wei Jiang

American Economic Review, December 2015

We analyze strategic speculators' incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading reveals private information to managers and improves their...

Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-channel Retailers

By Alberto Cavallo

American Economic Review, January 2017

Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices collected offline, where most retail transactions take place. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneo...

Peer Effects in the Workplace

By Thomas Cornelissen, Christian Dustmann, and Uta Schönberg

American Economic Review, February 2017

Existing evidence on peer effects in the productivity of coworkers stems from either laboratory experiments or real-world studies referring to a specific firm or occupation. In this paper, we aim at providing more generalizable results by investigating a ...

Roland Fryer: 2015 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Roland Fryer is an extraordinary applied microeconomist whose research output related to racial inequality, the US racial achievement gap, and the design and evaluation of educational policies make him a worthy recipient of the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal...