Evaluating State and Local Business Incentives

[Symposium: How Taxes Affect Location Choices]

By Cailin Slattery and Owen Zidar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

This essay describes and evaluates state and local business tax incentives in the United States. In 2014, states spent between 5 USD and 216 USD per capita on incentives for firms in the form of firm-specific subsidies and general tax credits, which mos...

Taxation and Migration: Evidence and Policy Implications

[Symposium: How Taxes Affect Location Choices]

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Mathilde Muñoz, and Stefanie Stantcheva

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effects of personal taxation on the geographic mobility of people and discuss its policy implications. We start by laying out the empirical challenges that prevented progress in this area ...

The Separation and Reunification of Germany: Rethinking a Natural Experiment Interpretation of the Enduring Effects of Communism

[Symposium: The Departure of Communism]

By Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, and Ludger Woessmann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West G...

The Long-Term Effects of Communism in Eastern Europe

[Symposium: The Departure of Communism]

By Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln and Matthias Schündeln

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

We analyze the long-term effects of communism on both policies and preferences in Eastern Europe in four areas in which the communist and capitalist doctrines fundamentally differ: government intervention in markets, political freedom, and inequality in i...

The Basic Economics of Internet Infrastructure

By Shane Greenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

The internet's structure and operations remain invisible to most economists. What determines the economic value of internet infrastructure and the incentives to improve it? What are the open research questions for the most salient policy issues? This arti...

The Economics of Tipping

By Ofer H. Azar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

Tipping involves dozens of billions of dollars annually in the US alone and is a major income source for millions of workers. But beyond its economic importance and various economic implications, tipping is also a unique economic phenomenon in that people...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

Rental housing, millenials, and Friedman

[News]

May 07, 2020

Reading recommendations from Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Dissecting monetary policy

[Research Highlight]

April 16, 2020

How much of the reaction to Fed policy is based on what officials say versus what they do?

Deconstructing Monetary Policy Surprises—The Role of Information Shocks

By Marek Jarociński and Peter Karadi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector au...

NSF has new Rapid Response Research funding program on COVID-19

[News]

May 08, 2020

The National Science Foundation (NSF) invites research proposals using the Rapid Response Research funding mechanism.

Tracking the evolution of work

[Page]

A new dataset on job tasks provides insight into how employment in the US changed.

Call for Papers: PSID User Conference 2020

[News]

March 13, 2020

The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2020.

Supplying a fiscal lifeline

[Research Highlight]

May 11, 2020

Valerie Ramey discusses what economists have learned about stimulus since the 2008 financial crisis.

Front Matter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Measuring the Impact of Free Goods on Real Household Consumption

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, W. Erwin Diewert, Felix Eggers, and Kevin J. Fox

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We suggest a methodology that allows statistical agencies to form approximations to the benefits that flow to households from new free goods. The present production-oriented GDP measures are not satisfactory for measuring real household consumption and wi...

Innovation α: What Do IP-Intensive Stock Price Indexes Tell Us about Innovation?

By Carol Corrado, David Martin, and Qianfan Wu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Patents and other intellectual property (IP) have grown in relative importance in investments and market capitalizations of public firms (e.g., Corrado and Hulten 2010). This paper illustrates the construction of IP-intensive stock price indexes, focusing...

Estimating Family Income from Administrative Banking Data: A Machine Learning Approach

By Diana Farrell, Fiona Greig, and Erica Deadman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The JPMorgan Chase Institute uses administrative banking data for research. In order to address representativeness in our data, we seek a reliable estimate of gross family income for population segmenting and reweighting purposes. JPMC Institute Income Es...

Technology and Big Data Are Changing Economics: Mining Text to Track Methods

By Janet Currie, Henrik Kleven, and Esmée Zwiers

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The last 40 years have seen huge innovations in computing and in the availability of data. Data derived from millions of administrative records or by using (as we do) new methods of data generation such as text mining are now common. New data often requir...

Internalizing Externalities: Designing Effective Data Policies

By Ryan Hill, Carolyn Stein, and Heidi Williams

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Many economics journals have recently invested in efforts to archive and curate research data and promote reproducible research. The economics profession has focused relatively less attention on what types of institutions and incentives might encourage an...