How has the economic risk of health spending changed over time for U.S. households? We describe trends in aggregate health spending in the United States and how private insurance markets and public insurance programs have changed over time. We then present evidence from Consumer Expenditure...

In this paper, we discuss some important data sets that can be used by economists interested in conducting research in health economics. We describe six types of data sets: health components of data sets traditionally used by economists; longitudinal surveys of health and economic behavior; data...

The rescue of the US automobile industry amid the 2008-2009 recession and financial crisis was a consequential, controversial, and difficult decision made at a fraught moment for the US economy. Both of us were involved in the decision process at the time, but since have moved back to academia....

To commemorate the new millennium and 50 issues of JEP, we have commissioned a series of essays in three broad areas. The first set of papers in this issue look back at key developments in the economy and economic thinking. In a second group of articles, we asked for predictions about the future...

Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we discuss research on how individuals'...

We consider the recently proposed "income-contingent loan" (ICL), in which Congress would establish a national trust fund from which students could borrow money to finance the cost of attending college; students would repay these loans by contributing a fixed proportion of their subsequent income...

This paper reviews and interprets the literature on the effects of school resources on students' eventual earnings and educational attainment. In addition, new evidence is presented on the impact of the great disparity in school resources between black and white students in North and South...

Instrumental variables was first used in the 1920s to estimate supply and demand elasticities and later to correct for measurement error in single equation models. Recently, instrumental variables have been widely used to reduce bias from omitted variables in estimates of causal relationships....