New Releases by Alan B. Krueger

Una de las cuestiones de política económica más debatidas en los últimos tiempos ha sido la de la fijación y el aumento del salario mínimo. David Card y Alan B. Krueger, dos de los economistas más reconocidos de las últimas décadas, adquirieron una gran notoriedad precisamente por desmontar los mitos que la ciencia económica mantenía acerca de esta cuestión. Con sus rompedoras investigaciones en el campo de la economía laboral, Card y Krueger desafiaron la creencia general de que un salario mínimo más alto implica reducir las oportunidades laborales para los trabajadores de bajos ingresos. Tal cuestionamiento de la teoría económica establecida es el que se recoge por primera vez en español en Mito y medición. El estudio, que tiene importantes implicaciones para las políticas públicas y para la orientación de la investigación económica, se sirve de abundante evidencia empírica y se nutre de experiencias recientes en Estados Unidos. Para cada uno de los casos, los economistas presentan una colección de datos que demuestran que los incrementos en el salario mínimo produjeron aumentos en los ingresos, pero no implicaron pérdidas de puestos de trabajo. Card y Krueger, mediante métodos empíricos importados de las ciencias naturales, revisan críticamente toda la literatura existente sobre el salario mínimo y nos brindan una nueva batería de argumentos para defender la pertinencia de esta política.

一篇被熱烈轉傳的演講稿，歷經多年增訂，終於出版問世。 經濟學里程碑之作，普林斯頓大學教授克魯格揭開全新成功法則： 贏者全拿的趨勢不會改變，但從尾端晉升頂端的方法已經改變。 忘掉富人與窮人，現在是有槓桿與無槓桿！ 7大搖滾經濟學原理，就是助你撐起工作與生活最強有力的槓桿原理。 ★從樂壇巨星到商業頂尖人士，最厲害的1%都是搖滾經濟學原理的實踐者！ ★柯林頓、歐巴馬首席經濟顧問重磅力作 ★解開決策、行銷與市場的奧祕，席捲各大媒體推薦書榜 為什麼突然間人們都在聽同一首歌，追同一部劇，瘋同一款球鞋？ 為什麼音樂已經變得比水更易取得，演唱會票價卻不降反而飆升？ 為什麼巨星們得意於票房秒殺，天后泰勒絲卻拉長售票時間、推粉絲認證？ 為什麼沒賣過一張實體唱片的獨立音樂人，卻逆勢名利雙收、贏得葛萊美獎？ 為什麼很多音樂人就像被詐欺一樣，不斷遭到所屬公司的不公平對待？ 被譽為「真正改變經濟學」的克魯格教授，帶你進入有趣的搖滾經濟學世界， 到音樂產業後台轉一轉，你也可以擁有巨星思維，在人生重要時刻，做出更好決策。 名列世界前50大經濟學家、普林斯頓大學教授克魯格在一次演講中首次提出「搖滾經濟學」的概念，他發現當今市場的變化與音樂產業的發展趨勢非常相似，正走向超級巨星主導一切，從音樂產業的創新重生，有助了解經濟與科技力量如何影響我們的生活、工作與商業運作，並從中領悟全新的生存與成功之道。克魯格當時的頂頭上司歐巴馬總統相當欣賞他的論點，並對身邊的人說：「你們每個人都應該讀一讀。」如今，這篇被熱烈轉傳的演講稿，歷經多年增補修訂，終於出版問世。本書囊括經濟學所有關鍵原理，精闢解讀既酷且殘酷的巨星市場與暢銷商品背後的真實邏輯，幫助我們看懂這個複雜世界。 從樂壇天后泰勒絲到商業巨擘貝佐斯， 最厲害的1%都是搖滾經濟學原理的實踐者！ ♪ 供需原理很重要，情感等其他相關因素也有玄機 ♪ 規模經濟與不可替代性，是打造超級巨星兩大要素 ♪ 成功需要運氣，而運氣是創造出來的 ♪ 活用鮑伊定理，最能開創互補商品利益者勝出 ♪ 善用心理因素差別訂價，是獲利泉源 ♪ 小心鮑莫爾成本病，別讓成本吞沒一切 ♪ 錢不是一切，活著的目的是為了得到快樂 本書採訪上百個天團、巨星，將滿足樂迷們的崇拜癮頭，更是一堂有趣實用、讓人大開眼界的經濟學大師課。 好評推薦 「搖滾經濟學不是一個抽象的理論，而是一種讓人們生活得更好的方法。」—前美國總統歐巴馬 「克魯格在過去30年是最重要的勞工經濟學家之一，也是真正改變經濟學的人。」―哈佛經濟學家凱茲 （Lawrence Katz） 「作者向我們闡釋了當今市場的變化與音樂產業的發展趨勢有多麼相似。不管是音樂人或一般人，每個人都想要有一份值得投入且報酬豐厚的工作、有足夠存款以備未來不時之需，以及追求幸福的生活。這些挑戰對所有人都至關緊要，了解並戰勝這些挑戰所需的基本知識，你在搖滾經濟學裡都能找到。」―《金融時報》 「音樂產業揭示當代經濟的奧祕。對於想要進入音樂產業或是已在這個產業的人，以及任何人來說，這本書都將讓你大開眼界。」―《經濟學人》 「音樂產業的重生，以及在數位時代獲取利潤的方法，可供其他產業借鏡。」―《華爾街日報》

“Müzik Kütüphanesi”nin ilk kitabı mart ayının başında çıktığında, 2020 yılının dünyayı durduracak bir salgınla “taç”lanmak üzere olduğunun farkında değildik. Yüz binlerce insanın hayatına mal olan küresel salgın, müzik endüstrisini de kökünden değiştirecek gibi görünüyor: Canlı müzik bir daha eskisi gibi olacak mı? Bu dönemde insanların ne kadarı bir araya gelerek eğlenmek isteyecek? Evden yapılan canlı yayınlar ve bu yayınların çoğunlukla “bedava” olması, dinleyicinin/izleyicinin kafasında performansın anlam ve önemine dair bir erozyona yol açacak mı? Müzisyenler, teknisyenler, ışıkçılar nasıl para kazanacak? Müzik, dünyanın en ucuz şeyi olmaya devam mı edecek, yoksa daha da mı ucuz olmalı? Peki müziksiz bir dünyayı birkaç gün deneyimlemek, acaba toplumun geri kalanına başka bir fikir verir miydi? Ve herkesi farklı farklı vuran bu salgın sırasında, müziğin bize nasıl güç, şifa ve dayanma gücü verdiğini bir kez daha görmedik mi? Müzik sektörünün dertleri giderek büyüyor ve dünya müzik çevreleri bu dertleri toplumun gündemine getirmenin yeni yollarını arıyor. Elinizde tuttuğunuz kitap, çok sıra dışı bir yazarın, çok yeni ve bu konular açısından çok önemli bir kitabı. Obama döneminin ekonomi başdanışmanı, iktisat profesörü Alan B. Krueger, Müzikonomi’de müzik endüstrisinin çeşitli yönleriyle fotoğrafını çekerken, buradaki eşitsizliklerden yola çıkarak dünya ekonomisine dair teşhis ve önerilerde bulunuyor.

Alan Krueger, a former chairman of the president''s Council of Economic Advisers, uses the music industry, from superstar artists to music executives, from managers to promoters, as a way in to explain key principles of economics, and the forces shaping our economic lives. The music industry is a leading indicator of today''s economy; it is among the first to be disrupted by the latest wave of technology, and examining the ins and outs of how musicians create and sell new songs and plan concert tours offers valuable lessons for what is in store for businesses and employees in other industries that are struggling to adapt. Drawing on interviews with leading band members, music executives, managers, promoters, and using the latest data on revenues, royalties, streaming tour dates, and merchandise sales, Rockonomics takes readers backstage to show how the music industry really works--who makes money and how much, and how the economics of the music industry has undergone a radical transformation during recent decades. Before digitalization and the ability to stream music over the Internet, rock stars made much of their income from record sales. Today, income from selling songs has plummeted, even for superstars like James Taylor and Taylor Swift. The real money nowadays is derived from concert sales. In 2017, for example, Billy Joel earned $27.4 million from his live performances, and less than $2 million from record sales and streaming. Even Paul McCartney, who has written and recorded more number one songs than anyone in music history, today, earns 80 percent of his income from live concerts. Krueger tackles commonly asked questions: How does a song become popular? And how does a new artist break out in today''s winner-take-all economy? How can musicians and everyday workers earn a living in the digital economy?

Why we need to think more like economists to successfully combat terrorism If we are to correctly assess the root causes of terrorism and successfully address the threat, we must think more like economists do. Alan Krueger’s What Makes a Terrorist, explains why our tactics in the fight against terrorism must be based on more than anecdote, intuition, and speculation. Many popular ideas about terrorists are fueled by falsehoods, misinformation, and fearmongering. Many believe that poverty and lack of education breed terrorism, despite a wealth of evidence showing that most terrorists come from middle-class and often college-educated backgrounds. Krueger closely examines the factors that motivate individuals to participate in terrorism, drawing inferences from terrorists’ own backgrounds and the economic, social, religious, and political environments in the societies from which they come. He describes which countries are the most likely breeding grounds for terrorists, and which ones are most likely to be their targets. Krueger addresses the economic and psychological consequences of terrorism and puts the threat squarely into perspective, revealing how our nation’s sizable economy is diverse and resilient enough to withstand the comparatively limited effects of most terrorist strikes. He also calls on the media to be more responsible in reporting on terrorism. Bringing needed clarity to one of the greatest challenges of our generation, this 10th anniversary edition of What Makes a Terrorist features a new introduction by the author that discusses the lessons learned in the past decade from the rise of ISIS and events like the 2016 Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida.

David Card and Alan B. Krueger received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2006 for their outstanding contributions to the field. This volume provides an overview of their most important work on school quality, differences in wages across groups in the US, and the effect of changes in the minimum wage on employment and wage setting.

We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C & B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between the college that students attended in 1976 and the earnings they self-reported reported in 1995 on the C & B follow-up survey. In this analysis, we use administrative earnings data to estimate the return to various measures of college selectivity for a more recent cohort of students: those who entered college in 1989. We also estimate the return to college selectivity for the 1976 cohort of students, but over a longer time horizon (from 1983 through 2007) using administrative data. We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents'' education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics.

In this report we discuss the expected effects of reforms in education and labor market policies already implemented or suggested by the current liberalconservative government in Sweden. According to our guidelines, the main focus is on whether the reforms are suited for the purpose of increasing employment, hours worked and productivity.

This study provides the first nation-wide analysis of the labor market implications of occupational licensing for the U.S. labor market, using data from a specially designed Gallup survey. We find that in 2006, 29 percent of the workforce was required to hold an occupational license from a government agency, which is a higher percentage than that found in studies that rely on state-level occupational licensing data. Workers who have higher levels of education are more likely to work in jobs that require a license. Union workers and government employees are more likely to have a license requirement than are nonunion or private sector employees. Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions -- that is about 15 percent, but unlike unions which reduce variance in wages, licensing does not significantly reduce wage dispersion for individuals in licensed jobs.

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others could bargain, but find it undesirable, because their right to bargain has induced a sufficiently favorable offer, which they accept. Yet others perceive that they cannot bargain over pay; they regard the posted wage as a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. Theories of wage formation point to substantial differences in labor-market equilibrium between bargained and posted wages. The fraction of workers hired away from existing jobs is another key determinant of equilibrium, because a worker with an existing job has a better outside option in bargaining than does an unemployed worker. Our survey measures the incidences of wage posting, bargaining, and on-the-job search. We find that about a third of workers had precise information about pay when they first met with their employers, a sign of wage posting. We find that another third bargained over pay before accepting their current jobs. And about 40 percent of workers could have remained on their earlier jobs at the time they accepted their current jobs.

This paper tests a central implication of the theory of equalizing differences, that workers sort into jobs with different attributes based on their preferences for those attributes. We present evidence from four new time-use data sets for the United States and France on whether workers who are more gregarious, as revealed by their behavior when they are not working, tend to be employed in jobs that involve more social interactions. In each data set we find a significant and sizable relationship between the tendency to interact with others off the job and while working. People''s descriptions of their jobs and their personalities also accord reasonably well with their time use on and off the job. Furthermore, workers in occupations that require social interactions according to the O''Net Dictionary of Occupational Titles tend to spend more of their non-working time with friends. Lastly, we find that workers report substantially higher levels of job satisfaction and net affect while at work if their jobs entail frequent interactions with coworkers and other desirable working conditions.

A large central government providing numerous public services has long been a hallmark of Swedish society, which is also well-known for its pursuit of equality. Yet in the 1990s, Sweden moved away from this tradition in education, introducing market-oriented reforms that decentralized authority over public schools and encouraged competition between private and public schools. Many wondered if this approach would improve educational quality, or if it might expand inequality that Sweden has fought so hard to hold down. In The Market Comes to Education in Sweden, economists Anders Björklund, Melissa Clark, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson, and Alan Krueger measure the impact of Sweden''s bold experiment in governing and help answer the questions that societies across the globe have been debating as they try to improve their children''s education. The Market Comes to Education in Sweden injects some much-needed objectivity into the heavily politicized debate about the effectiveness of educational reform. While advocates for reform herald the effectiveness of competition in improving outcomes, others suggest that the reforms will grossly increase educational inequality for young people. The authors find that increased competition did help improve students'' math and language skills, but only slightly, and with no effect on the performance of foreign-born students and those with low-educated parents. They also find some signs of increasing school segregation and wider inequality in student performance, but nothing near the doomsday scenarios many feared. In fact, the authors note that the relationship between family background and school performance has hardly budged since before the reforms were enacted. The authors conclude by providing valuable recommendations for school reform, such as strengthening school evaluation criteria, which are essential for parents, students, and governments to make competent decisions regarding education. Whether or not the market-oriented reforms to Sweden''s educational system succeed will have far reaching implications for other countries considering the same course of action. The Market Comes to Education in Sweden offers firm empirical answers to the questions raised by school reform and brings crucial facts to the debate over the future of schooling in countries across the world.

Between 1996 and 1998 California and Texas eliminated the use of affirmative action in college and university admissions. At the states'' elite public universities admission rates of black and Hispanic students fell by 30-50 percent and minority representation in the entering freshman classes declined. In this paper we ask whether the elimination of affirmative action caused any change in the college application behavior of minority students in the two states. A particular concern is that highly qualified minorities - who were not directly affected by the policy change - would be dissuaded from applying to elite public schools, either because of the decline in campus diversity or because of uncertainty about their admission prospects. We use information from SAT-takers in the two states to compare the fractions of minority students who sent their test scores to selective state institutions before and after the elimination of affirmative action. We find no change in the SAT-sending behavior of highly qualified black or Hispanic students in either state.

"This article responds to Peterson and Howell''s (PH''s) defense of their voucher research. We show that PH''s rationales for excluding some 815 students, more than 40% of their sample, because they lacked baseline data in a randomized experiment are unconvincing"--P. 718.

Two leading economists debate the effectiveness ofhuman capital policies in addressing widening U.S inequality.

The positive social benefits of low unemployment are many—it helps to reduce poverty and crime and fosters more stable families and communities. Yet conventional wisdom—born of the stagflation of the 1970s—holds that sustained low unemployment rates run the risk of triggering inflation. The last five years of the 1990s—in which unemployment plummeted and inflation remained low—called this conventional wisdom into question. The Roaring Nineties provides a thorough review of the exceptional economic performance of the late 1990s and asks whether it was due to a lucky combination of economic circumstances or whether the new economy has somehow wrought a lasting change in the inflation-safe rate of unemployment. Led by distinguished economists Alan Krueger and Robert Solow, a roster of twenty-six respected economic experts analyzes the micro- and macroeconomic factors that led to the unexpected coupling of low unemployment and low inflation. The more macroeconomically oriented chapters clearly point to a reduction in the inflation-safe rate of unemployment. Laurence Ball and Robert Moffitt see the slow adjustment of workers'' wage aspirations in the wake of rising productivity as a key factor in keeping inflation at bay. And Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen credit sound monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board with making the best of fortunate circumstances, such as lower energy costs, a strong dollar, and a booming stock market. Other chapters in The Roaring Nineties examine how the interaction between macroeconomic and labor market conditions helped sustain high employment growth and low inflation. Giuseppe Bertola, Francine Blau, and Lawrence M. Kahn demonstrate how greater flexibility in the U.S. labor market generated more jobs in this country than in Europe, but at the expense of greater earnings inequality. David Ellwood examines the burgeoning shortage of skilled workers, and suggests policies—such as tax credits for businesses that provide on-the-job-training—to address the problem. And James Hines, Hilary Hoynes, and Alan Krueger elaborate the benefits of sustained low unemployment, including budget surpluses that can finance public infrastructure and social welfare benefits—a perspective often lost in the concern over higher inflation rates. While none of these analyses promise that the good times of the 1990s will last forever, The Roaring Nineties provides a unique analysis of recent economic history, demonstrating how the nation capitalized on a lucky confluence of economic factors, helping to create the longest peacetime boom in American history. Copublished with The Century Foundation