Contraction and Expansion: The Divergence of Private Sector and Public Sector Unionism in the United States

[Symposium: Explaining Savings]

By Richard B. Freeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

The institutional structure of the American labor market changed remarkably from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1980s. What explains the decline in union representation of private wage and salary workers? Why have unions expanded in the public sector while co...

Can Higher Prices Stimulate Product Use? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Zambia

By Nava Ashraf, James Berry, and Jesse M. Shapiro

American Economic Review, December 2010

The controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologic...

After the Big Bang? Obstacles to the Emergence of the Rule of Law in Post-Communist Societies

By Karla Hoff and Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, June 2004

Default Tips

By Kareem Haggag and Giovanni Paci

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

We examine the role of defaults in high-frequency, small-scale choices using unique data on over 13 million New York City taxi rides. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that default tip suggestions have a large impact on tip amounts. These r...

The Japanese Saving Rate

By Kaiji Chen, Ayşe İmrohoroğlu, and Selahattin İmrohoroğlu

American Economic Review, December 2006

Despite much work, economists have not been able to quantitatively account for the differences in the Japanese and U.S. saving rates after World War II. In this paper, we show that the use of actual Japanese total factor productivity growth rates in a sta...

Do Opposites Detract? Intrahousehold Preference Heterogeneity and Inefficient Strategic Savings

By Simone Schaner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

This paper uses a field experiment to test whether intrahousehold heterogeneity in discount factors leads to inefficient strategic savings behavior. I gave married couples in rural Kenya the opportunity to open both joint and individual bank accounts at r...

Innovation and Cooperation: Implications for Competition and Antitrust

[Symposium: Collaboration, Innovation and Antitrust]

By Thomas M. Jorde and David J. Teece

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

This paper begins by describing the nature of the innovation process. We then explore socially beneficial forms of cooperation that can assist the development and commercialization of new technology, and suggest modifications to current U.S. antitrust law...

Puzzles: Queues, Coups and More

By Barry Nalebuff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

This is my ninth and last column of puzzles.

Asymmetric Incentives in Subsidies: Evidence from a Large-Scale Electricity Rebate Program

By Koichiro Ito

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

Many countries use substantial public funds to subsidize reductions in negative externalities. Such policy designs create asymmetric incentives because increases in externalities remain unpriced. I investigate the implications of such policies by using a ...

Constrained School Choice: An Experimental Study

By Caterina Calsamiglia, Guillaume Haeringer, and Flip Klijn

American Economic Review, September 2010

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Su...

Advertising Content

By Simon P. Anderson and Régis Renault

American Economic Review, March 2006

Empirical evidence suggests that most advertisements contain little direct information. Many do not mention prices. We analyze a monopoly firm's choice of advertising content and the information disclosed to consumers. The firm advertises only product inf...

Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies for International Financial Stability: A Proposal

By Ronald I. McKinnon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

What keeps the three major industrial blocs -- Western Europe, North America, and industrialized Asia -- from developing a common monetary standard to prevent exchange-rate fluctuations? One important reason is the differing theoretical perspectives of ec...

Why Beauty Matters

By Markus M. Mobius and Tanya S. Rosenblat

American Economic Review, March 2006

We decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market where "employers" determine wages of "workers" who perform a maze-solving task. This task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness. We find a sizable be...

Inflation in the Great Recession and New Keynesian Models

By Marco Del Negro, Marc P. Giannoni, and Frank Schorfheide

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2015

Several prominent economists have argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent Great Recession. We challenge this argument by showing that a standard DSGE model w...

Age at Arrival, English Proficiency, and Social Assimilation among US Immigrants

By Hoyt Bleakley and Aimee Chin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

Are the English proficiency and social outcomes of US immigrants the result of their cultural preferences or of more fundamental constraints? Using 2000 census microdata, we relate the English proficiency, marriage, fertility, and residential location ...

A Lost Generation? Education Decisions and Employment Outcomes during the US Housing Boom-Bust Cycle of the 2000s

By Luc Laeven and Alexander Popov

American Economic Review, May 2016

We exploit regional variations in U.S. house price fluctuations during the boom-bust cycle of the 2000s to study the impact of the housing cycle on young Americans' choices related to education and employment. We find that in MSAs which experienced large ...

The Survival of the Welfare State

By John Hassler, José V. Rodríguez Mora, Kjetil Storesletten, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, March 2003

This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting, where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution. A key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends p...

The Causes of Metropolitan Suburbanization

By Peter Mieszkowski and Edwin S. Mills

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

In this paper, we investigate the causes of metropolitan suburbanization. We consider two classes of theories of suburbanization, both of which are important: the first, favored by urban theorists and transportation experts, might be called a natural evol...

Why Do So Many Young American Men Commit Crimes and What Might We Do about It?

[Symposium: The Economics of Crime]

By Richard B. Freeman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

This paper shows that participation in crime and involvement with the criminal justice system has reached extraordinary levels among young men. With approximately 2 percent as many men incarcerated as in the labor force, the crime rate should have plummet...

Explaining Bargaining Impasse: The Role of Self-Serving Biases

By Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

The authors review studies conducted by themselves and coauthors that document a 'self-serving' bias in judgments of fairness and demonstrate that the bias is an important cause of impasse in negotiations. They discuss experimental evidence showing that (...