The Lessons of Limited Market-Oriented Reform

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By Thomas A. Wolf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

The waves of reform and restructuring now engulfing most of Eastern Europe did not begin from the same starting point in each country. While they all share a common economic legacy—the traditional Soviet-type centrally planned economy—some cou...

The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design Is Taking the Con out of Econometrics

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Since Edward Leamer's memorable 1983 paper, "Let's Take the Con out of Econometrics," empirical microeconomics has experienced a credibility revolution. While Leamer's suggested remedy, sensitivity analysis, has played a role in this, we argue that the pr...

Going to a Better School: Effects and Behavioral Responses

By Cristian Pop-Eleches and Miguel Urquiola

American Economic Review, June 2013

This paper applies a regression discontinuity design to the Romanian secondary school system, generating two findings. First, students who have access to higher achievement schools perform better in a (high stakes) graduation test. Second, the stratifi...

Clientelism in Indian Villages

By Siwan Anderson, Patrick Francois, and Ashok Kotwal

American Economic Review, June 2015

We study the operation of local governments (Panchayats) in rural Maharashtra, India, using a survey that we designed for this end. Elections are freely contested, fairly tallied, highly participatory, non-coerced, and lead to appointment of representativ...

What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World?

By Steven D. Levitt and John A. List

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on f...

Sanctions on South Africa: What Did They Do?

By Philip I. Levy

American Economic Review, May 1999

The Failure and Promise of Mandated Consumer Mortgage Disclosures: Evidence from Qualitative Interviews and a Controlled Experiment with Mortgage Borrowers

By James M. Lacko and Janis K. Pappalardo

American Economic Review, May 2010

FOMC Forward Guidance and Investor Beliefs

By Arunima Sinha

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper considers the effect of different dimensions of the FOMC's forward guidance on ex ante investor expectations about future changes in US Treasury yields. Options and Futures data for 2- and 10-year Treasuries is used to extract State-Price Densi...

Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem

By Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

The economics profession includes disproportionately few women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups, relative both to the overall population and to other academic disciplines. This underrepresentation within the f...

Comment on Poirer: Operational Bayesian Methods in Econometrics

By John Geweke

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

[This paper responds to "Frequentist and Subjectivist Perspectives on the Problems of Model Building in Economics," by Dale J. Poirier, in this same issue.] My purpose in this comment is to illustrate that economists can indeed act upon the agenda implied...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

The VCG Auction in Theory and Practice

By Hal R. Varian and Christopher Harris

American Economic Review, May 2014

We describe two auction forms for search engine advertising and present two simple theoretical results concerning i) the estimation of click-through rates and ii) how to adjust the auctions for broad match search. We also describe some of the practical is...

Retrospectives: X-Efficiency

By Michael Perelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

In a 1966 article in the American Economic Review, Harvey Leibenstein introduced the concept of "X-efficiency": the gap between ideal allocative efficiency and actually existing efficiency. Leibenstein insisted that absent strong competitive pre...

Slicing Up Global Value Chains

[Symposium: Global Supply Chains]

By Marcel P. Timmer, Abdul Azeez Erumban, Bart Los, Robert Stehrer, and Gaaitzen J. de Vries

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

In this paper, we "slice up the global value chain" using a decomposition technique that has recently become feasible due to the development of the World Input-Output Database. We trace the value added by all labor and capital that is directly and indirec...

Taxation and the International Mobility of Inventors

By Ufuk Akcigit, Salomé Baslandze, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, October 2016

We study the effect of top tax rates on "superstar" inventors' international mobility since 1977, using panel data on inventors from the US and European Patent Offices. We exploit the differential impact of changes in top tax rates on inventors of differe...

Symposium on Primary and Secondary Education

[Symposium: Primary and Secondary Education]

By Francine D. Blau

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

This article introduces the 'Symposium on Primary and Secondary Education.' It points out that considerable controversy surrounds the issues treated by the articles in the symposium: the effect of the level of resources invested in education on student ou...

Cardinality versus Ordinality: A Suggested Compromise

By Michael Mandler

American Economic Review, September 2006

By taking sets of utility functions as primitive, we define an ordering over assumptions on utility functions that gauges their measurement requirements. Cardinal and ordinal assumptions constitute two levels of measurability, but other assumptions lie ...

Economic Theory and the World of Practice: A Celebration of the (S, s) Model

By Andrew Caplin and John Leahy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

It was the question of how best to balance the costs of ordering and of running out of stock against the costs of holding excess inventory that inspired Kenneth Arrow, Theodore Harris, and Jacob Marschak to introduce the (S, s) model in...

Contracts as a Barrier to Entry in Markets with Nonpivotal Buyers

By Özlem Bedre-Defolie and Gary Biglaiser

American Economic Review, July 2017

Considering markets with nonpivotal buyers, we analyze the anticompetitive effects of breakup fees used by an incumbent facing a more efficient entrant in the future. Buyers differ in their intrinsic switching costs. Breakup fees are profitably used to fo...

A Flawed Ideological Critique

By William B. Walstad

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

In their critique of the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL), Nelson and Sheffrin draw the conclusion that the TEL is an ideological test. In making their case, however, they neglect to cite the TEL Examiner's Manual by John Soper and myself (1987). In the 67...