Journal of Economic Perspectives
0895-3309
1944-7965
Mỹ
Cơ quản chủ quản: AMER ECONOMIC ASSOC , American Economic Association
Lĩnh vực:
Economics and Econometrics
Phân tích ảnh hưởng
Thông tin về tạp chí
The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) attempts to fill a gap between the general interest press and most other academic economics journals. The journal aims to publish articles that will serve several goals: to synthesize and integrate lessons learned from active lines of economic research; to provide economic analysis of public policy issues; to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas among the fields of thinking; to offer readers an accessible source for state-of-the-art economic thinking; to suggest directions for future research; to provide insights and readings for classroom use; and to address issues relating to the economics profession. Articles appearing in the journal are normally solicited by the editors and associate editors. Proposals for topics and authors should be directed to the journal office.
Các bài báo tiêu biểu
Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship Accepting a fixed trade-off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress. Studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts, ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation. They typically overestimated compliance costs, neglected innovation offsets, and disregarded the affected industry's initial competitiveness. Rather than simply adding to cost, properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets, allowing companies to improve their resource productivity. Shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward. It is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity.
Tập 9 Số 4 - Trang 97-118 - 1995
Economic Prescriptions for Environmental Problems: How the Patient Followed the Doctor's Orders In this paper, I consider two tools which have received widespread support from the economics community: marketable permits and emission charges. Until the 1960s, these tools only existed on blackboards and in academic journals, as products of the fertile imaginations of academics. However, some countries have recently begun to explore using these tools as part of a broader strategy for managing environmental problems. This paper chronicles the experience with both marketable permits and emissions charges. It also provides a selective analysis of a variety of applications in Europe and the United States and shows how the actual use of these tools tends to depart from the role which economists have conceived for them.
Tập 3 Số 2 - Trang 95-114 - 1989
Competition and Truth in the Market for News In this essay, we evaluate the case for competition in news markets from the perspective of economics. First, we consider the simple proposition that when more points of view are heard and defended, beliefs will converge to the truth. This concept of “competition” is several steps removed from market competition among actual media firms, but it has played a prominent role in the legal arguments for a free press. We then explore three mechanisms by which increasing competition, or more precisely increasing the number of independently-owned firms, can limit bias or distortions that originate on the supply-side of the media market: First, when governments attempt to manipulate news, competition can increase the likelihood that the media remain independent. Second, when news providers have an interest in manipulating consumers' beliefs, diversity in such incentives can reduce the risk of information being suppressed or distorted. Third, competition may drive firms to invest in providing timely and accurate coverage. Overall, we argue that there are robust reasons to expect competition to be effective in disciplining supply-side bias. Next, we ask how the effect of competition changes when distortions originate on the demand side of the market—when consumers themselves demand biased or less socially relevant news. We find that increased competition may or may not improve welfare in these cases, though we caution against using this as a justification for concentrating media power in the hands of state-controlled or regulated firms.
Tập 22 Số 2 - Trang 133-154 - 2008
Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not Crime dropped sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. I conclude that four factors collectively explain the entire drop in crime: increases in the number of police, increases in the size of the prison population, the waning of the crack epidemic, and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Other common explanations for declining crime appear far less important. The factors identified are much less successful in explaining fluctuations in crime in the preceding two decades. The real puzzle is not why crime fell in the 1990s, but rather, why crime did not begin falling earlier.
Tập 18 Số 1 - Trang 163-190 - 2004
The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption and Saving A central implication of life-cycle models is that agents smooth consumption. We review the empirical evidence on smoothing at frequencies from within the year up to across a lifetime. We find that life-cycle models--particular those which incorporate realistic features of markets and goods--have more empirical successes than failures. We also show that some apparent deviations from theoretical predictions imply very small welfare losses for agents. Finally, we emphasize that the coherence of life-cycle models imposes an important discipline when incorporating new features into models.
Tập 15 Số 3 - Trang 3-22 - 2001
Puzzles: Love and Spaghetti, The Opportunity Cost of Virtue In honor of St. Valentine's day, we offer a puzzle about love and a puzzle about virtue.
Tập 3 Số 2 - Trang 165-173 - 1989
Anomalies: Saving, Fungibility, and Mental Accounts Last New Year's day, after a long evening of rooting the right team to victory in the Orange Bowl, I was lucky enough to win $300 in a college football betting pool. I then turned to the important matter of splurging the proceeds wisely. Would a case of champagne be better than dinner and a play in New York? At this point my son Greg came in and congratulated me. He said, “Gee Dad, you should be pretty happy. With that win you can increase your lifetime consumption by $20 a year!” Greg, it seems, had studied the life-cycle theory of savings. The theory is simple, elegant, and rational—qualities valued by economists. Unfortunately, as Courant, Gramlich, and Laitner observe “for all its elegance and rationality, the life-cycle model has not tested out very well.” In this column, however, I focus on an assumption of the life-cycle model that has not received very much attention, but which, if modified, can allow the theory to explain many of the savings anomalies that have been observed. The key assumption is fungibility. This column will review a small portion of the empirical savings literature, with the objective of showing how violations of fungibility, and more generally the role of self-control, strongly influences saving behavior.
Tập 4 Số 1 - Trang 193-205 - 1990
Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game This paper discusses simple ultimatum games, two-stage bargaining ultimatum games, and multistage ultimatum games. Finally, I discuss ultimatums in the market. Any time a monopolist (or monopsonist) sets a price (or wage), it has the quality of an ultimatum.
Tập 2 Số 4 - Trang 195-206 - 1988
Selection in Insurance Markets: Theory and Empirics in Pictures Government intervention in insurance markets is ubiquitous and the theoretical basis for such intervention, based on classic work from the 1970s, has been the problem of adverse selection. Over the last decade, empirical work on selection in insurance markets has gained considerable momentum. This research finds that adverse selection exists in some insurance markets but not in others. And it has uncovered examples of markets that exhibit “advantageous selection”—a phenomenon not considered by the original theory, and one that has different consequences for equilibrium insurance allocation and optimal public policy than the classical case of adverse selection. Advantageous selection arises when the individuals who are willing to pay the most for insurance are those who are the most risk averse (and so have the lowest expected cost). Indeed, it is natural to think that in many instances individuals who value insurance more may also take action to lower their expected costs: drive more carefully, invest in preventive health care, and so on. Researchers have taken steps toward estimating the welfare consequences of detected selection and of potential public policy interventions. In this essay, we present a graphical framework for analyzing both theoretical and empirical work on selection in insurance markets. This graphical approach provides both a useful and intuitive depiction of the basic theory of selection and its implications for welfare and public policy, as well as a lens through which one can understand the ideas and limitations of existing empirical work on this topic.
Tập 25 Số 1 - Trang 115-138 - 2011
Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making This paper introduces a three-item “Cognitive Reflection Test” (CRT) as a simple measure of one type of cognitive ability—the ability or disposition to reflect on a question and resist reporting the first response that comes to mind. The author will show that CRT scores are predictive of the types of choices that feature prominently in tests of decision-making theories, like expected utility theory and prospect theory. Indeed, the relation is sometimes so strong that the preferences themselves effectively function as expressions of cognitive ability—an empirical fact begging for a theoretical explanation. The author examines the relation between CRT scores and two important decision-making characteristics: time preference and risk preference. The CRT scores are then compared with other measures of cognitive ability or cognitive “style.” The CRT scores exhibit considerable difference between men and women and the article explores how this relates to sex differences in time and risk preferences. The final section addresses the interpretation of correlations between cognitive abilities and decision-making characteristics.
Tập 19 Số 4 - Trang 25-42 - 2005