The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act

By John T. Addison and McKinley L. Blackburn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

With the passage of the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, the United States belatedly joined the large number of industrialized nations that require employers to provide affected workers with advance notice of a plant closing or mass...

Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence

By Raj Chetty, Adam Looney, and Kory Kroft

American Economic Review, September 2009

Using two strategies, we show that consumers underreact to taxes that are not salient. First, using a field experiment in a grocery store, we find that posting tax-inclusive price tags reduces demand by 8 percent. Second, increases in taxes included in...

Women on Welfare: A Macroeconomic Analysis

By Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, and John A. Knowles

American Economic Review, May 2000

Does Network Theory Connect to the Rest of Us? A Review of Matthew O. Jackson's Social and Economic Networks

By James E. Rauch

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

The ubiquity of networks in our social lives has long been recognized, and their importance in our economic lives is increasingly recognized as well. Yet the literature synthesized in Matthew O. Jackson's Social and Economic Networks, which covers the the...

Business and Social Networks in International Trade

By James E. Rauch

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

The first two main sections survey the roles of transnational networks in alleviating problems of contract enforcement and providing information about trading opportunities, respectively. The next section covers how domestic networks influence internation...

The Declining Fortunes of the Young since 2000

By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand

American Economic Review, May 2014

We document that successive cohorts of college and post-college degree graduates experienced an increase in the probability of obtaining cognitive jobs both at the start of their careers and with time in the labor market in the 1990s. However, this patter...

The Structure of the Tax System versus the Level of Taxation: An Evaluation of the 1986 Act

[Symposium: Tax Reform Act of 1986]

By J. Gregory Ballentine

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

In this paper, I assess the 1986 Tax Reform Act relative to the tax system that might have evolved over the several years following 1986 had that particular tax reform not been enacted. Had tax reform not been enacted, I believe that the pattern of steady...

Clearing Up the Fiscal Multiplier Morass

By Eric M. Leeper, Nora Traum, and Todd B. Walker

American Economic Review, August 2017

We quantify government spending multipliers in US data using Bayesian prior and posterior analysis of a monetary model with fiscal details and two distinct monetary-fiscal policy regimes. The combination of model specification, observable data, and relati...

Front Matter

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2010

Patent Laws, Product Life-Cycle Lengths, and Multinational Activity

By L. Kamran Bilir

American Economic Review, July 2014

Do intellectual property rights influence multinationals' manufacturing location decisions? My theoretical model indicates that countries with strong patent laws attract multinational activity, but only in sectors with relatively long product life cycles....

Retrospectives: Trouble in the Inaugural Issue of the American Economic Review: The Cross/Eaves Controversy

By Ann Mari May and Robert W. Dimand

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009

The papers from the first year of the American Economic Review are included in the Archives of the American Economic Association. While researching the early years of the AEA, Ann Mari May came across a folder marked "Controversies, Criticisms, etc."-whi...

As Ye Sweep, So Shall Ye Reap

By Rachel Dunifon, Greg J. Duncan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

American Economic Review, May 2001

The World Bank: Why It Is Still Needed and Why It Still Disappoints

[Symposium: The Bretton Woods Institutions]

By Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Does the World Bank still have an important role to play? How might it fulfill that role? The paper begins with a brief account of how the Bank works. It then argues that, while the Bank is no longer the primary conduit for capital from high-income to low...

Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession: Report of Committee Activities for the 2009 Calendar Year

By Ngina Chiteji

American Economic Review, May 2010

Saving Lives at Birth: The Impact of Home Births on Infant Outcomes

By N. Meltem Daysal, Mircea Trandafir, and Reyn van Ewijk

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are ...

Financial Networks and Contagion

By Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, and Matthew O. Jackson

American Economic Review, October 2014

We study cascades of failures in a network of interdependent financial organizations: how discontinuous changes in asset values (e.g., defaults and shutdowns) trigger further failures, and how this depends on network structure. Integration (greater dep...

The Economics of HIV/AIDS in Low-Income Countries: The Case for Prevention

[Symposium: Disease and Development]

By David Canning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

There are two approaches to reducing the burden of sickness and death associated with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which leads to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS): treatment and prevention. Despite large international aid flows for HIV...

Anomalies: The Equity Premium Puzzle

By Jeremy J. Siegel and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

The equity premium is the difference in returns between equities and fixed income securities, such as Treasury bills. The puzzle refers to the fact that the premium has historically been very large--about 6 percent per year--too large to be easily explain...

Game Theory in Economics and Beyond

[Symposium: What is Happening in Game Theory?]

By Larry Samuelson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Within economics, game theory occupied a rather isolated niche in the 1960s and 1970s. It was pursued by people who were known specifically as game theorists and who did almost nothing but game theory, while other economists had little idea what game theo...

The Economics of Two-Sided Markets

By Marc Rysman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009

Broadly speaking, a two-sided market is one in which 1) two sets of agents interact through an intermediary or platform, and 2) the decisions of each set of agents affects the outcomes of the other set of agents, typically through an externality. In the c...