Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from US Patents

By David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Gary Pisano, and Pian Shu

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Manufacturing accounts for more than three-quarters of US corporate patents. The competitive shock to this sector emanating from China's economic ascent could in theory either augment or stifle US innovation. Using three decades of US patents matched to c...

The Long-Term Impacts of Grants on Poverty: Nine-Year Evidence from Uganda's Youth Opportunities Program

By Christopher Blattman, Nathan Fiala, and Sebastian Martinez

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

In 2008, Uganda gave 400 USD per person to thousands of young people to help them start skilled trades, work more, and raise incomes. Four years on, an experimental evaluation found grants raised work by 17 percent and earnings by 38 percent (Blattman, Fi...

Nonlinear Pricing with Average-Price Bias

By David Martimort and Lars A. Stole

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Empirical evidence suggests that consumers facing complex nonlinear prices often make choices based on average (not marginal) prices. Given such behavior, we characterize a monopolist's optimal nonlinear price schedule. In contrast to the textbook setting...

Revisiting the Global Decline of the (Non-housing) Labor Share

By Germán Gutiérrez and Sophie Piton

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

We show that cross-country comparisons of corporate labor shares are affected by differences in the delineation of corporate sectors. While the United States excludes all self-employed and most dwellings from the corporate sector, other countries include ...

Quality-Adjusted House Price Indexes

By Adam D. Nowak and Patrick S. Smith

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

The constant-quality assumption in repeat-sales house price indexes (HPIs) introduces a significant time-varying attribute bias. The direction, magnitude, and source of the bias varies throughout the market cycle and across metropolitan statistical areas ...

Bitcoin: An Axiomatic Approach and an Impossibility Theorem

By Jacob D. Leshno and Philipp Strack

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Bitcoin's main innovation lies in allowing a decentralized system that relies on anonymous, profit-driven miners who can freely join the system. We formalize these properties in three axioms: anonymity of miners, no incentives for miners to consolidate, a...

Market rushes

[Research Highlight]

August 27, 2020

How well informed are traders during a panic?

Webinar on the Job Market for New Economics Ph.D.s

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Job Postings for Fellows Positions 2021

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Kill the machines

[Research Highlight]

August 31, 2020

To what extent can technological disruption lead to civil unrest?

Rage against the Machines: Labor-Saving Technology and Unrest in Industrializing England

By Bruno Caprettini and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Can new technology cause social instability and unrest? We examine the famous "Captain Swing" riots in 1830s England. Newly collected data on threshing machine diffusion shows that labor-saving technology was associated with more riots. We instrument tech...

Risk equals reward

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Wealth inequality is growing, in part, because rich people can be riskier with their money.

Model Averaging and Its Use in Economics

By Mark F. J. Steel

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

The method of model averaging has become an important tool to deal with model uncertainty, for example in situations where a large amount of different theories exist, as are common in economics. Model averaging is a natural and formal response to mode...

Commanding Nature by Obeying Her: A Review Essay on Joel Mokyr's A Culture of Growth

By Enrico Spolaore

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occu...

Explaining the Decline in the US Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence

By Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

This paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2018. Population aging has had...

Where Economics Went Wrong: A Review Essay

By Marianne Johnson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

In their recent book, Where Economics Went Wrong, David Colander and Craig Freedman (2019) argue that economics went wrong when it abandoned the Classical liberal firewall that demanded separation of scientific theory from the art of policy m...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020