Fertility and the Personal Exemption: Comment

By Richard Crump, Gopi Shah Goda, and Kevin J. Mumford

American Economic Review, June 2011

One of the most commonly cited studies on the effect of child subsidies on fertility, Whittington, Alm, and Peters (1990), claimed a large positive effect of child tax benefits on fertility using time series methods. We revisit this question in light of r...

Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: A Comment

By Antonio Ciccone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti (2004), henceforth MSS, argue that lower rainfall levels and negative rainfall shocks increase conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa. This conclusion rests on their finding of a negative correlation betw...

Growth in Women's Relative Wages and in Inequality among Men: One Phenomenon or Two?

By Finis Welch

American Economic Review, May 2000

Economics and Electronic Commerce

[Symposium: E-Commerce]

By Severin Borenstein and Garth Saloner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

Dealing with Monetary Paralysis at the Zero Bound

[Symposium: The Global Monetary System]

By Kenneth Rogoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

Recently, the key constraint for central banks is the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Central banks fear that if they push short-term policy interest rates too deeply negative, there will be a massive flight into paper currency. This paper...

Global Warming Policy: A Public Finance Perspective

[Symposium]

By James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

In the last few years, a substantial volume of research has considered the design of taxes to slow greenhouse gas emissions as well as the economic effects of such policies. In this paper, I summarize the insights that have emerged from this work. I begin...

Costly Persuasion

By Matthew Gentzkow and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Review, May 2014

We study the design of informational environments in settings where generating information is costly. We assume that the cost of a signal is proportional to the expected reduction in uncertainty. We show that Kamenica & Gentzkow's (2011) concavification a...

The Role of Potential Competition in Industrial Organization

By Richard J. Gilbert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

Potential competition is important as a mechanism to control market power. I assess the strengths and limitations of alternative theories of potential competition by examining the available theoretical, empirical and institutional knowledge. I consider fo...

Attrition in Economics Ph.D. Programs

By Wendy A. Stock, T. Aldrich Finegan, and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2006

Evidence on Discrimination in Mortgage Lending

[Symposium: Discrimination in Product, Credit and Labor Markets]

By Helen F. Ladd

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

Much of the controversy about whether mortgage lenders discriminate against minorities can be explained in terms of the confusion about how to define discrimination. Based on the legal definition, careful studies of loan denial rates, such as that done by...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

Aid, Policies, and Growth

By Craig Burnside and David Dollar

American Economic Review, September 2000

This paper uses a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid, economic policies, and growth per capita GDP. We find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal, monetary, and trade poli...

Peer Effects and Alcohol Use among College Students

By Michael Kremer and Dan Levy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

This paper examines the extent to which college students who drink alcohol influence their peers. We exploit a natural experiment in which students at a large state university were randomly assigned roommates through a lottery system. We find that on aver...

The Taylor Rule and Optimal Monetary Policy

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, May 2001

Index Number Issues in the Consumer Price Index

[Symposium: Measuring the CPI]

By W. Erwin Diewert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

This paper addresses the following issues: what is an appropriate theoretical consumer price index that statistical agencies should attempt to measure; what are some of the possible sources of biases between the fixed base Laspeyres price index that stati...

Transfer Payments and the Macroeconomy: The Effects of Social Security Benefit Increases, 1952-1991

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2016

This paper uses Social Security benefit increases from 1952 to 1991 to investigate the macroeconomic effects of changes in transfers. It finds a large, immediate, and significant positive response of consumption to permanent benefit increases. The respons...

The Age of Milton Friedman

By Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

Between 1980 and 2005, as the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply, while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined. Is this a coincidence? A collection of essays edited ...

Payday Lending

By Michael A. Stegman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

A "payday loan" is a short-term loan made for seven to 30 days for a small amount. Fees charged on payday loans generally range from $15 to $30 on each $100 advanced. A typical example would be that in exchange for a $300 advance until the next payday, th...

Nash Equilibrium and the History of Economic Theory

By Roger B. Myerson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 1999

John Nash's formulation of noncooperative game theory was one of the great breakthroughs in the history of social science. Nash's work in this area is reviewed in its historical context to better understand how the fundamental ideas of noncooperative game...

Doing It Now or Later

By Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, March 1999

The authors examine self-control problems--modeled as time-inconsistent, present-biased preferences--in a model where a person must do an activity exactly once. They emphasize two distinctions: do activities involve immediate costs or immediate rewards, a...