Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation (1911)

By Katharine Coman

American Economic Review, February 2011

A reprint of the lead article in the inaugural issue of the American Economic Review, "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation," by Katharine Coman, who examined the common property resource problem as applied to water in the Western United States.

Reflections on "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation"

By Elinor Ostrom

American Economic Review, February 2011

It is instructive to read the article that Katharine Coman published in the first issue of the American Economic Review to gain insight into the problems of collective action related to irrigation in the American West. One gains further understanding of t...

Institutional Path Dependence in Climate Adaptation: Coman's "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation"

By Gary D. Libecap

American Economic Review, February 2011

Katharine Coman's "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation," published in March 1911 in the first issue of the American Economic Review, addressed issues of water supply, rights, and organization. These same issues have relevance today, in the face...

The Problem of the Commons: Still Unsettled after 100 Years

By Robert N. Stavins

American Economic Review, February 2011

The problem of the commons is more important to our lives and thus more central to economics than a century ago when Katharine Coman led off the first issue of the American Economic Review. As the US and other economies have grown, the carrying capacity ...

The Squam Lake Report: Commentary

By Charles A. E. Goodhart

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

The idea of the Squam Lake Report was to bring together some fifteen leading U.S. financial economists to see what regulatory changes they could jointly agree and thereby influence policy discussions. Seeking to find a consensus, however, meant ...

Financial Regulation: Lessons from the Recent Financial Crises

By Takeo Hoshi

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

The experiences of the financial crises in the United States recently and in Japan in the 1990s suggest two lessons for future financial regulations. First, the lack of an orderly resolution mechanism for large and complex financial institutions created ...

Can Government Purchases Stimulate the Economy?

By Valerie A. Ramey

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

This essay briefly reviews the state of knowledge about the government spending multiplier. Drawing on theoretical work, aggregate empirical estimates from the United States, as well as cross-locality estimates, I assess the likely range of multiplier va...

An Empirical Analysis of the Revival of Fiscal Activism in the 2000s

By John B. Taylor

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

An empirical review of the three fiscal stimulus packages of the 2000s shows that they had little if any direct impact on consumption or government purchases. Households largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government only increased pu...

On Measuring the Effects of Fiscal Policy in Recessions

By Jonathan A. Parker

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2011

We do not have a good measure of the effects of fiscal policy in a recession because the methods that we use to estimate the effects of fiscal policy—both those using the observed outcomes following different policies in aggregate data and those st...

Getting Up to Speed on the Financial Crisis: A One-Weekend-Reader's Guide

By Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

All economists should be conversant with "what happened?" during the financial crisis of 2007-09. We select and summarize sixteen documents, including academic papers and reports from regulatory and international agencies. This reading list covers the ke...

Reading about the Financial Crisis: A Twenty-One-Book Review

By Andrew W. Lo

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of twenty-one books on the crisis, eleven written by academics, and ten written by journalists and one former Treasury Sec...

Consumer Protection and Contingent Charges

By Mark Armstrong and John Vickers

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2012

Contingent charges for financial services, such as fees for unauthorized overdrafts, are often controversial. We study the economics of contingent charges in a stylized setting with naive and sophisticated consumers. We contrast situations where the naive...

Financial Advice

By Roman Inderst and Marco Ottaviani

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2012

Financial advice could play an essential role in well-functioning markets for retail financial products, given that many consumers find it difficult to evaluate the complex products on offer. However, conflicts of interest, which are pervasive in some pa...

The Mirrlees Review and the State of Public Economics

By Anthony B. Atkinson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

The Mirrlees Review of taxation in the United Kingdom is a landmark in the analysis of U.K. fiscal policy, and of wide interest to public finance economists around the world. This review concentrates on what we can learn from the Review about the current ...

The Mirrlees Review

By Martin Feldstein

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

The Mirrlees Review is an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the British tax system with detailed recommendations for reform. This review essay focuses on those issues that are also likely to be of interest to an American reader. The Review has the t...

Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics

By David Card and Stefano DellaVigna

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-five journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annua...

Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How?

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Presenting data on all full-length articles in the three top general economics journals for one year in each decade 1960s-2010s, I analyze changes in patterns of coauthorship, age structure and methodology, and their possible causes. The distribution of n...

Uncertainty Measures for Economics Journal Impact Factors

By David I. Stern

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Academic economists appear to be intensely interested in rankings of journals, institutions, and individuals. Yet there is little discussion of the uncertainty associated with these rankings. To illustrate the uncertainty associated with citations-based r...

Bounded-Rationality Models: Tasks to Become Intellectually Competitive

By Ronald M. Harstad and Reinhard Selten

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Research in experimental economics has cogently challenged the fundamental precept of neoclassical economics that economic agents optimize. The last two decades have seen elaboration of boundedly rational models that try to move away from the optimizati...

Boundedly Rational versus Optimization-Based Models of Strategic Thinking and Learning in Games

By Vincent P. Crawford

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Harstad and Selten's article in this forum performs a valuable service by highlighting the dominance of optimization-based models over boundedly rational models in modern microeconomics, and questioning whether optimization-based models are a better wa...