Economic Network

Journal of Economic Literature

Vol. 53, Issue 3 

September 2015

 

 

Journal of Economic Literature
Vol. 53, Issue 3 — September 2015

 

(1) Front Matter
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

(2) Health and the Economy in the United States from 1750 to the Present
Dora L. Costa
I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that health improvements were largest among the poor. Health improvements were not a precondition for modern economic growth. The gains to health are largest when the economy has moved from „brawn“ to „brains“ because this is when the wage returns to education are high, leading the healthy to obtain more education. More education may improve use of health knowledge, producing a virtuous cycle. (JEL H51, I10, J13, N31, N32)
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

(3) The Beveridge Curve: A Survey
Michael W. L. Elsby, Ryan Michaels and David Ratner
Important progress has been made in economists‘ understanding of the Beveridge curve, from its measurement to its expression in canonical labor market models. Yet enduring puzzles remain. Chief among these are the empirical role of vacancies in the recruitment process; the amplitude, comovement, and persistence of cyclical unemployment-vacancy dynamics; and the sources of lateral shifts in the Beveridge curve. The synthesis of these themes identifies several priorities for ongoing research, including the role of entry costs into vacancy creation in shaping Beveridge dynamics; the cyclicality of search intensity, both off and on the job, and its relation to participation and job-to-job transitions; the theory and measurement of mismatch; and the sources of hysteresis in unemployment flows. (JEL E24, J63, J64)
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

(4) Communicating Uncertainty in Official Economic Statistics: An Appraisal Fifty Years after Morgenstern
Charles F. Manski
Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error free or may incorrectly conjecture error magnitudes. This paper discusses strategies to mitigate misinterpretation of official statistics by communicating uncertainty to the public. Sampling error can be measured using established statistical principles. The challenge is to satisfactorily measure the various forms of nonsampling error. I find it useful to distinguish transitory statistical uncertainty, permanent statistical uncertainty, and conceptual uncertainty. I illustrate how each arises as the Bureau of Economic Analysis periodically re vises GDP estimates, the Census Bureau generates household income statistics from surveys with nonresponse, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics seasonally adjusts employment statistics. I anchor my discussion of communication of uncertainty in the contribution of Oskar Morgenstern (1963a), who argued forcefully for agency publication of error estimates for official economic statistics. (JEL B22, C82, E23)
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

(5) A Review of The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey Sachs
Matthew E. Kahn
How does economic science inform the study of sustainable development? In his new book, Jeffrey D. Sachs analyzes the challenges of achieving economic growth while protecting the environment and achieving an equitable distribution of resources. This review presents an overview of this ambitious book with special emphasis on the role of the objectives of local and national leaders and their incentives to pursue the sustainability agenda. Given the huge migration to cities now playing out in the developing world, special attention is paid to the role of urbanization as a cause of sustainability opportunities and challenges. (JEL Q01, Q54, Q56, R11)
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

(6) Learning from Failure: A Review of Peter Schuck’s Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better
David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart
Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf’s theory of nonmarket failures in which „internalities“ replace the heavily-studied market failure from externalities (Wolf 1979). Internalities are evidence of a discord between the public goals by which a program is defended and the private goals of its administrators. What might economists contribute? We suggest that economists have neglected internalities because they take group goals as exogenously determined and we defend an alternative tradition in which group goals are endogenously determined. (JEL A11, D72, D82)
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

(7) Book Reviews
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials