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Milton Friedman on Economics Book Now Available

Upon his death in the autumn of 2006, Milton Friedman was lauded as “the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era” by The New York Times and “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century” by The Economist. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, Friedman was both a highly respected economist and a prominent public intellectual, the leader of a revolution in economic and political thought that argued robustly in favor of the virtues of free markets and laissez-faire policies.

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ITEM! Political Candidates Are Buying Your Vote
New Paper for the Journal of Political Economy Exposes the Economics of Election Year Promises


An-arrgh-chy!
What Blackbeard Can Teach Us About Politics

In the News

Featured in Slate.com
" You're Saving Enough for Retirement (Probably)
" June 14, 2008
Are Americans Saving “Optimally” for Retirement?
John Karl Scholz, Ananth Seshadri, and Surachai Khitatrakun
"An admired analysis of retirement saving was published in 2006 in the Journal of Political Economy by John Karl Scholz and two colleagues...They concluded that more than 80 percent of Americans seemed to be on track to retire with enough money in the bank; the remainder were mostly not far short of sensible savings."

Featured in National Public Radio
"Thank You for Advertising" August 10, 2007
Private Profits and Public Health: Does Advertising of Smoking Cessation Products Encourage Smokers to Quit?

ROSEMARY AVERY
DONALD KENKEL
DEAN R. LILLARD
ALAN MATHIOS


We study the impact of smoking cessation product advertising. To measure potential exposure, we link survey data on magazine-reading habits and smoking behavior with an archive of print advertisements. We find that smokers who are exposed to more advertising are more likely to attempt to quit and to successfully quit. While some increased quitting involves product purchases, we find that product advertisements also prompt cold turkey quitting. Identifying the causal impact of advertising is difficult because advertisers target consumers. Although reverse causality could bias our estimates upward, our baseline results are not sensitive to a series of checks.

December 2003

Volume 111, Number 6
[Journal of Political Economy, 2003, vol. 111, no. 6]
0022-3808/2003/11106-0002$10.00
DOI: 10.1086/378526

The Correlation of Wealth across Generations

Kerwin Kofi Charles

University of Michigan and National Bureau of Economic Research

Erik Hurst

University of Chicago

In this paper, we find that the age-adjusted elasticity of child wealth with respect to parental wealth is 0.37 before the transfer of bequests. Lifetime income and asset ownership jointly explain nearly two-thirds of the wealth elasticity. Education, past parental transfers, and expected future bequests account for little of the remaining elasticity. Survey measures of risk correlate strongly between parents and children. However, they explain little of the intergenerational similarity in the propensity to own different assets, suggesting that children's savings propensities are determined by mimicking their parents' behavior, or the inheritance of preferences not related to risk tolerance. Our results imply that while parents do pass on human capital and saving propensities to their children, the level of intergenerational fluidity is much greater than that suggested by recent accounts in the popular press.

Cited by

Matthias Doepke, Fabrizio Zilibotti. (2008) Occupational Choice and the Spirit of Capitalism*. Quarterly Journal of Economics 123:2, 747-793
Online publication date: 1-Jun-2008.
CrossRef
Hanming Fang, Michael P. Keane, and Dan Silverman. (2008) Sources of Advantageous Selection: Evidence from the Medigap Insurance Market. Journal of Political Economy 116:2, 303-350
Online publication date: 1-Apr-2008.
Lutz Hendricks. (2007) RETIREMENT WEALTH AND LIFETIME EARNINGS. International Economic Review 48:2, 421-456
Online publication date: 1-Jun-2007.
CrossRef
Janet Currie and Enrico Moretti. (2007) Biology as Destiny? Short- and Long-Run Determinants of Intergenerational Transmission of Birth Weight. Journal of Labor Economics 25:2, 231-264
Online publication date: 1-Apr-2007.
Erik Hurst and Annamaria Lusardi. (2004) Liquidity Constraints, Household Wealth, and Entrepreneurship. Journal of Political Economy 112:2, 319-347
Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004.
  • We thank Heidi Shierholz for excellent research assistance and participants at the NBER 2000 summer consumption workshop, the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business macro lunch, the University of Michigan's labor seminar, Dartmouth's economic workshop, Wisconsin's public finance workshop, University of Maryland's macro seminar, University of Florida's applied economics workshop, and Purdue University's macro/international workshop for helpful comments. Additionally, we would like to thank Mark Aguiar, Orazio Attanasio, Rebecca Blank, John Bound, Sam Bowles, Charlie Brown, John Cochrane, Steve Davis, Anil Kashyap, Kevin Lang, Glen Loury, Anna Lusardi, Casey Mulligan, Karl Sholz, Jonathan Skinner, Gary Solon, Nick Souleles, and two anonymous referees. Hurst would also like to thank the financial support given by the William Ladany Research Fund at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, for work on this project. Charles gratefully acknowledges support from the National Institute on Aging grant P01-AG10179.

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