Evolution and Human Nature

[Symposium: Evolutionary Economics]

By Arthur J. Robson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This paper considers how biological evolution shaped the elements of a simple but complete model of economic decision making. These elements are preferences, beliefs and rationality. Whereas Nature might impose preferences over consumption on the individu...

Policy Watch: The Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan

By Roger Feldman, Kenneth E. Thorpe, and Bradley Gray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This short feature describes the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP), which provides health insurance benefits to active and retired federal employees and their dependents. The article discusses the FEHBP as a touchstone for research on employm...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

The Inheritance of Inequality

[Symposium: Intergenerational Mobility]

By Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

How level is the intergenerational playing field? What are the causal mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of economic status? Are these mechanisms amenable to public policies in a way that would make the attainment of economic succ...

Is India's Economic Growth Leaving the Poor Behind?

[Symposium: India]

By Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Has poverty continued to fall with growth in India in the 1990s, or has the nature of the growth process changed, such that the poor have been left behind? This paper tries to answer those questions. We do not attempt to assess the impact of India's macro...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Comments

By Robert S. Goldfarb, H. O. Stekler, David Neumark, William Wascher, and T. D. Stanley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

The NAIRU in Theory and Practice

By Laurence Ball and N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

This paper discusses the NAIRU--the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. It first considers the role of the NAIRU concept in business cycle theory, arguing that this concept is implicit in any model in which monetary policy influences both inf...

Modeling the Transition to a New Economy: Lessons from Two Technological Revolutions

By Andrew Atkeson and Patrick J. Kehoe

American Economic Review, March 2007

Many view the period after the Second Industrial Revolution as a paradigm of a transition to a new economy following a technological revolution, including the Information Technology Revolution. We build a quantitative model of diffusion and growth duri...

Oligopsony and Monopsonistic Competition in Labor Markets

By V. Bhaskar, Alan Manning, and Ted To

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

We argue that models of oligopsony or monopsonistic competition provide insights and explanation for many empirical phenomena in labor markets. Using a simple model with job differentiation and preference heterogeneity, we illustrate how such models can b...

Income and Substitution Effects of Estate Taxation

By James R. Hines Jr.

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper evaluates the effect of estate taxes on labor supply. The analysis decomposes the effect of estate taxation into the substitution effect of relative price changes and the two income effects for which the estate tax is responsible. These two inc...

Saving and Growth with Habit Formation

By Christopher D. Carroll, Jody Overland, and David N. Weil

American Economic Review, June 2000

Saving and growth are strongly positively correlated across countries. Recent empirical evidence suggests that this correlation holds largely because high growth leads to high saving, not the other way around. This evidence is difficult to reconcile with ...

The Dynamic Free Rider Problem: A Laboratory Study

By Marco Battaglini, Salvatore Nunnari, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

We report the results of an experiment that investigates free riding in the accumulation of durable public goods. We consider economies with reversibility, where contributions can be positive or negative; and economies with irreversibility, where contribu...

On the Possibility of Credit Rationing in the Stiglitz-Weiss Model

By Lutz G. Arnold and John G. Riley

American Economic Review, December 2009

Contrary to what is usually assumed, the expected revenue for lenders as a function of the loan rate cannot be globally hump-shaped in the Stiglitz-Weiss (1981) adverse selection model with a continuum of types. This has important implications. First, ...

The Economist's Lament: Public Assistance in America

[Symposium: Welfare and Workfare]

By Gary Burtless

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

This survey will provide a brief summary of the main features of the U.S. welfare system together with an assessment of some major criticisms of it. I will discuss major reforms proposed by economists and consider some recent evidence about the behavioral...

Saving Soviet Science: The Impact of Grants When Government R&D Funding Disappears

By Ina Ganguli

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

I estimate the impact of a historic grant program, funded by George Soros, that provided grants to over 28,000 Soviet scientists shortly after the end of the USSR. Exploiting a discontinuity in the grant eligibility formula, I show that the grants more th...

Shadowy Banks and Financial Contagion during the Great Depression: A Retrospective on Friedman and Schwartz

By Kris James Mitchener and Gary Richardson

American Economic Review, May 2013

This essay assesses whether network linkages within the banking system amplified the real effects of bank failures during the Great Contraction. In 1929, nearly all interbank deposits held by Federal Reserve member banks belonged to "shadowy" nonmember ba...

What Is Meant by "Replication" and Why Does It Encounter Resistance in Economics?

By Maren Duvendack, Richard Palmer-Jones, and W. Robert Reed

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper discusses recent trends in the use of replications in economics. We include the results of recent replication studies that have attempted to identify replication rates within the discipline. These studies generally find that replication rates a...

Inequality in the Labor Market for Native American Women and the Great Recession

By Jeffrey D. Burnette

American Economic Review, May 2017

This research paper builds on previous literature and documents general changes in the labor market for Native American women that occurred during the Great Recession using extracts of data from the Current Population Survey Annual Earnings file, known as...