Retrospectives: The Lost Art of Economics

By David Colander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Economists generally divide economics into two distinct categories—positive and normative—but how applied economics fits within these categories is unclear. This paper argues that applied economics belongs in neither normative nor positive eco...

Women's Work and Economic Development

[Symposium: Women and the Labor Market]

By Kristin Mammen and Christina Paxson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

Using a cross-country dataset and microdata from India and Thailand, we examine how women's work status changes with economic development. Several clear patterns emerge: women's labor force participation first declines and then rises with development; wom...

Impact of Climate Change on Rice Production in Thailand

By John Felkner, Kamilya Tazhibayeva, and Robert Townsend

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Empirical Impact of Intellectual Property Rights on Innovation: Puzzles and Clues

By Josh Lerner

American Economic Review, May 2009

Demographic Patterns and Household Saving in China

By Chadwick C. Curtis, Steven Lugauer, and Nelson C. Mark

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2015

This paper studies how demographic variation affects the aggregate household saving rate. We focus on China because it is experiencing an historic demographic transition and has had a massive increase in household saving. We conduct a quantitative investi...

Political Campaigns and Big Data

[Symposium: Big Data]

By David W. Nickerson and Todd Rogers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Modern campaigns develop databases of detailed information about citizens to inform electoral strategy and to guide tactical efforts. Despite sensational reports about the value of individual consumer data, the most valuable information campaigns acquire ...

Just Luck: An Experimental Study of Risk-Taking and Fairness: Erratum

By Alexander W. Cappelen, James Konow, Erik Ø. Sørensen, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, February 2016

China's Exchange Rate Trap: Japan Redux?

By Ronald McKinnon

American Economic Review, May 2006

Efficient Patent Pools

By Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, June 2004

The paper builds a tractable model of patent pools, agreements among patent owners to license sets of their patents. It provides a necessary and sufficient condition for patent pools to enhance welfare and shows that requiring pool members to be able to i...

The Wrong Side(s) of the Tracks: The Causal Effects of Racial Segregation on Urban Poverty and Inequality

By Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

A striking negative correlation exists between an area's residential racial segregation and its population characteristics, but it is recognized that this relationship may not be causal. I present a novel test of causality from segregation to population ...

Cheating Ourselves: The Economics of Tax Evasion

[Symposium: U.S. Tax Policy in International Perspective]

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

No government can announce a tax system and then rely on taxpayers' sense of duty to remit what is owed. Some dutiful people will undoubtedly pay what they owe, but many others will not. Over time the ranks of the dutiful will shrink, as they see how th...

Whom or What Does the Representative Individual Represent?

By Alan P. Kirman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1992

Macroeconomic models often assume that the choices of all the diverse agents in one sector—consumers for example—can be considered as the choices of one "representative" standard utility maximizing individual whose choices coincide with the ag...

Wage Dynamics: Reconciling Theory and Evidence

By Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, May 1999

Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms

By Elinor Ostrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

I assume multiple types of players--"rational egoists," as well as "conditional cooperators" and "willing punishers"--in models of nonmarket behavior. I use an indirect evolutionary approach to explain how multiple types of players could survive and flour...

Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads, and Informational Cascades

By Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

Learning by observing the past decisions of others can help explain some otherwise puzzling phenomena about human behavior. For example, why do people tend to converge on similar behavior? Why is mass behavior prone to error and fads? The authors argue th...

Why Are Indian Children So Short? The Role of Birth Order and Son Preference

By Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande

American Economic Review, September 2017

Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India's steep birth order gradient i...

The Determinants of Earnings: A Behavioral Approach

By Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

We survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success. We suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education, the inheritance of wealt...

Trade Costs

By James E. Anderson and Eric van Wincoop

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2004

This paper surveys the measurement of trade costs: what we know and don't know but may usefully attempt to learn. Partial and incomplete data on direct measures of costs go with inference on implicit costs from trade flows and prices. Total trade costs in...

Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps

By Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its effectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric stra...

Trade and Investment under Policy Uncertainty: Theory and Firm Evidence

By Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

In a dynamic model with sunk export costs, a firm's export investment is lower under trade policy uncertainty, and credible preferential trade agreements (PTAs) increase trade even if current tariffs are low. Exploring Portugal's accession to the European...