Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...

Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...

Understanding inequality and devising policies to alleviate it was a central focus of Jan Tinbergen's lifetime research. He was far ahead of his time in many aspects of his work. This essay places his work in the perspective of research on inequality in his time and now, focusing on his studies...

In this article, I summarize Griliches' contributions to economics and to applied econometrics.

I describe and compare sources of data on citations in economics and the statistics that can be constructed from them. Constructing data sets of the post-publication citation histories of articles published in the "Top 5" journals in the 1970s and the 2000s, I examine distributions and life...

This paper celebrates the life and contributions of Gary Becker (1930-2014).

Gary Becker's classic study, A Theory of the Allocation of Time, laid the analytical foundations for the study of household production and the allocation of time within the household. The analytical framework of household production theory developed in this paper remained a pillar of his later...

This paper presents Gary Becker's approach to conducting creative, empirically fruitful economic research. It describes the traits and methodology that made him such a productive and influential scholar.

The previously documented trend toward more co- and multi-authored research in economics is partly (perhaps 20 percent) due to different research styles of scholars in different birth cohorts (of different ages). Most of the trend reflects profession-wide changes in research style. Older...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand earnings distribution. In the years since Mincer?s seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array of observations pertaining...