Sharing fake news

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Overconfidence in detecting lies may be helping them spread.

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Benjamin K. Couillard, Christopher L. Foote, Kavish Gandhi, Ellen Meara, and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The twenty-first century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply beca...

The Causal Effects of Place on Health and Longevity

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Tatyana Deryugina and David Molitor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Life expectancy varies substantially across local regions within a country, raising conjectures that place of residence affects health. However, population sorting and other confounders make it difficult to disentangle the effects of place on health from ...

When Innovation Goes Wrong: Technological Regress and the Opioid Epidemic

By David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The fourfold increase in opioid deaths between 2000 and 2017 rivals even the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis for America. Why did it happen? Measures of demand for pain relief—physical pain and despair—are high and in many cases rising, but their...

Neighborhoods Matter: Assessing the Evidence for Place Effects

By Eric Chyn and Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

How does one's place of residence affect individual behavior and long-run outcomes? Understanding neighborhood and place effects has been a leading question for social scientists during the past half-century. Recent empirical studies using experimental an...

College Majors, Occupations, and the Gender Wage Gap

By Carolyn M. Sloane, Erik G. Hurst, and Dan A. Black

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The paper assesses gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college-educated and highlights how those differences have evolved over time. Women choose majors with lower potential earnings (based on male wages associated with those m...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Next-Generation Policing Research: Three Propositions

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Monica C. Bell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The Black Lives Matter movement has operated alongside a growing recognition among social scientists that policing research has been limited in its scope and outmoded in its assumptions about the nature of public safety. This essay argues that social scie...

The Economics of Policing and Public Safety

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Emily Owens and Bocar Ba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime-reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of d...

The US Pretrial System: Balancing Individual Rights and Public Interests

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Will Dobbie and Crystal S. Yang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effectiveness and fairness of the US pretrial system and discuss its policy implications. Despite the importance of this stage of the criminal legal process, researchers have only recently...

Fragile Algorithms and Fallible Decision-Makers: Lessons from the Justice System

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Jens Ludwig and Sendhil Mullainathan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Algorithms (in some form) are already widely used in the criminal justice system. We draw lessons from this experience for what is to come for the rest of society as machine learning diffuses. We find economists and other social scientists have a key role...

Inside the Box: Safety, Health, and Isolation in Prison

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Bruce Western

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

A large social science research literature examines the effects of prisons on crime and socioeconomic inequality, but the penal institution itself is often a black box overlooked in the analysis of its effects. This paper examines prisons and their role i...

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholars Grant

[News]

November 04, 2021

The deadline for applications is December 15, 2021.

Increasing access to knowledge

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How relaxed copyright protections affect scientific innovation

Assistant Professor in Labor/Demographic Economics

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CBDCs, sustainable food, and post-Covid capitalism

[News]

November 04, 2021

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

CSWEP Registration for Mentoring Breakfasts

[News]

November 09, 2021

Mentoring Breakfasts for junior and mid-career economists will be held during the virtual ASSA 2022 meeting.

The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners after the Civil War

By Philipp Ager, Leah Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson

American Economic Review, November 2021

The nullification of slave wealth after the US Civil War (1861–1865) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that White Southern households that owned more slaves in 1860 lost substantially more wealth by 1870, rela...

Bye, local

[Research Highlight]

November 10, 2021

Better intercity transportation spurred the decline of sole proprietorships in American cities at the turn of the 20th century.