Approval Voting

[Symposium: Economics of Voting]

By Robert J. Weber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1995

Under approval voting, a voter may cast single votes for each of any number of candidates. In this paper, the history of approval voting and some of its properties are reviewed. When voters vote sincerely, approval voting compares favorably with both the ...

Evaluating Econometric Evaluations of Post-Secondary Aid

By Josh Angrist, David Autor, Sally Hudson, and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, May 2015

In an ongoing evaluation of post-secondary financial aid, we use random assignment to assess the causal effects of large privately-funded aid awards. Here, we compare the unbiased causal effect estimates from our RCT with two types of non-experimental eco...

The Economic Consequences of Family Policies: Lessons from a Century of Legislation in High-Income Countries

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fertility, and child development. Wh...

Retrospectives: Irving Fisher's Appreciation and Interest (1896) and the Fisher Relation

By Robert W. Dimand and Rebeca Gomez Betancourt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Irving Fisher's monograph Appreciation and Interest (1896) proposed his famous equation showing expected inflation as the difference between nominal interest and real interest rates. In addition, he drew attention to insightful remarks and numerical examp...

Job Ladders and Earnings of Displaced Workers

By Pawel Krolikowski

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2017

Workers who suffer job displacement experience surprisingly large and persistent earnings losses. This paper proposes an explanation for this robust empirical puzzle in a model of search with a significant job ladder and increased separation rates for the...

Has the Increased Attachment of Women to the Labor Market Changed a Family's Ability to Smooth Income Shocks?

By Olga Gorbachev

American Economic Review, May 2016

An increase in a married woman's attachment to the labor market affected her family's ability to smooth unexpected income shocks. Between 1970 and 1990, the sharp rise in labor market attachment provided an increasingly important channel for smoothing sho...

Randomized Evaluations of Educational Programs in Developing Countries: Some Lessons

By Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, May 2003

This paper reviews recent randomized evaluations of educational programs in developing countries, including programs to increase school participation, to provide educational inputs, and to reform education. It then extracts some lessons for education poli...

The Reform of Federal Deposit Insurance

[Symposium: Federal Deposit Insurance]

By Lawrence J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

In early 1989, the system of deposit insurance in the United States was in crisis. The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), the U.S. government agency that provided deposit insurance for savings and loan (thrift) institutions, had susta...

Only One Tree from Each Seed? Environmental Effectiveness and Poverty Alleviation in Mexico's Payments for Ecosystem Services Program

By Jennifer M. Alix-Garcia, Katharine R. E. Sims, and Patricia Yañez-Pagans

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

Environmental conditional cash transfers are popular but their impacts are not well understood. We evaluate land cover and wealth impacts of a federal program that pays landowners for protecting forest. Panel data for program beneficiaries and rejected ap...

Putting Ricardo to Work

[Symposium: International Trade]

By Jonathan Eaton and Samuel Kortum

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

David Ricardo (1817) provided a mathematical example showing that countries could gain from trade by exploiting innate differences in their ability to make different goods. In the basic Ricardian example, two countries do better by specializing in differe...

Professors in Core Science Fields Are Not Always Biased against Women: Evidence from France

By Thomas Breda and Son Thierry Ly

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

We investigate the link between how male-dominated a field is, and gender bias against women in this field. Taking the entrance exam of a French higher education institution as a natural experiment, we find that evaluation is actually biased in favor o...

Word-of-Mouth Communication and Percolation in Social Networks

By Arthur Campbell

American Economic Review, October 2013

This paper develops a model of demand, pricing and advertising in the presence of social learning via word-of-mouth communication between friends. In the model consumers must receive information about a monopolist's product in order to consider purchas...

Should We Fear Derivatives?

By René M. Stulz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

This paper discusses the extent to which derivatives pose threats to firms and to the economy. After reviewing the derivatives markets and putting in perspective the various measures of the size of these markets, the paper shows who uses derivatives and w...

The Political Economy of Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Gérard Roland

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The overriding importance of political constraints in the transition process has led to developments of the theory of the political economy of reform. What are the main insights from that theory? How does it reflect the transition reality? What have we le...

An Efficient Ascending-Bid Auction for Multiple Objects

By Lawrence M. Ausubel

American Economic Review, December 2004

When bidders exhibit multi-unit demands, standard auction methods generally yield inefficient outcomes. This article proposes a new ascending-bid auction for homogeneous goods, such as Treasury bills or telecommunications spectrum. The auctioneer announce...

Experimental Age Discrimination Evidence and the Heckman Critique

By David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button

American Economic Review, May 2016

We design and implement a large-scale field experiment on age discrimination to address limitations of past research that may bias their results. One limitation is the practice of giving older and younger applicants similar experience in the job to which ...

A Reassessment of the Relationship between Inequality and Growth

By Kristin J. Forbes

American Economic Review, September 2000

This paper challenges the current belief that income inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth. It uses an improved data set on income inequality, which not only reduces measurement error, but also allows estimation via a panel technique...

The Process of Socialist Economic Transformation

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

By Stanley Fischer and Alan Gelb

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

In this paper, we consider the reform process in those Central and East European countries that have made the decision to move from a more-or a less-planned socialist system to a private market economy, one in which private ownership predominates and most...

Monetary Policy and Multiple Equilibria

By Jess Benhabib, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, and Martín Uribe

American Economic Review, March 2001

This paper characterizes conditions under which interest-rate feedback rules that set the nominal interest rate as an increasing function of the inflation rate induce aggregate instability by generating multiple equilibria. It shows that these conditions ...

Do Government Grants to Private Charities Crowd Out Giving or Fund-raising?

By James Andreoni and A. Abigail Payne

American Economic Review, June 2003

Economists have long observed that crowding out of government grants to private charities is incomplete. The accepted belief is that givers treat the grants as imperfect substitutes for private giving. We theoretically and empirically investigate a second...