Welch and Moses Abramovitz and two referees for help at various stages of our work. This survey represents a substantial revision of work originally supported by the Minimum Wage Study Commission.

This essay examines the extent to which research on the economics of race and crime produced by Black economists or published in the flagship journal of the organization of Black economists, the Review of Black Political Economy (RBPE), is undervalued by mainstream economics. We use modern bibliometric methods to test for citation biases in the economics of crime literature. We also identify the contributions of three streams of research overlooked in the mainstream literature: identity, police use of force, and mass incarceration. We find evidence that Blacks publishing on race and crime in top economics journals are less likely to be cited than non-Blacks and that articles published in the RBPE are less likely to be cited than articles published in other journals. A review of some under-cited articles reveals that themes related to identity, police use of force, and mass incarceration hold valuable insights for policy makers and those seeking solutions to problems of persistent racial disparities in the criminal legal system.

We approach the literature on housing and inequality from two angles. One is the impact of unequal endowments on housing. The second is the “memberships” inequality associated with neighborhoods, namely, households’ location in a geographic and social context. We elaborate on these two angles of inequality and focus on three distinctive features of housing: consumption, capital, and location. For owner-occupants, capital and consumption are bundled together in a single good. For both renters and owner-occupants, housing consumption inequality, access to good neighborhoods, and housing wealth follow from unequal endowments. Housing can propagate inequality by enabling owner-occupants to use it as collateral for other investments or to secure higher returns to human capital investments through the better schools in better neighborhoods. We use this approach to analyze key aspects of housing and inequality, paying special attention to the impacts of racial discrimination and segregation.

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a novel computational methodology for representing the behavior of individuals in order to study social phenomena. Its use is rapidly growing in many fields. We review ABM in economics and finance and highlight how it can be used to relax conventional assumptions in standard economic models. ABM has enriched our understanding of markets, industrial organization, labor, macro, development, public policy, and environmental economics. In financial markets, substantial accomplishments include understanding clustered volatility, market impact, systemic risk, and housing markets. We present a vision for how ABMs might be used in the future to build more realistic models of the economy and review some of hurdles that must be overcome to achieve this.

Empirical research on cities starts with a spatial equilibrium condition: workers and firms are assumed to be indifferent across space. This condition implies that research on cities is different from research on countries, and that work on places within countries needs to consider population, income, and housing prices simultaneously. Housing supply elasticity will determine whether urban success reveals itself in the form of more people or higher incomes. Urban economists generally accept the existence of agglomeration economies, which exist when productivity rises with density, but estimating the magnitude of those economies is difficult. Some manufacturing firms cluster to reduce the costs of moving goods, but this force no longer appears to be important in driving urban success. Instead, modern cities are far more dependent on the role that density can play in speeding the flow of ideas. Finally, urban economics has some insights to offer related topics such as growth theory, national income accounts, public economics, and housing prices.

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.

The continuation of low rates of fertility and reductions in mortality rates of the elderly have revived the interest of economists in the examination of the economic impacts of aging populations. These concerns combined with the analysis of the income status of the elderly and their activities from the broad framework of the economics of aging. The rapid growth of support programs for the aged also has been the focus of considerable economic analysis. This review highlights the most important areas of research in the literature on aging. The first section discusses the determinants of population age structure changes and their impact on the size and composition of the dependent groups. The following section provides a review of the economic status of the elderly and the sources of income in old age. Section III incorporates the economic characteristics of the elderly into a life-cycle context while Section IV examines the empirical evidence concerning labor supply decisions of the aged. Social Security and private pensions and their influence on the economy are analyzed in Section V. The final section of this article reviews evidence on the interaction between aging and macroeconomic variables. (excerpt)

This study surveys the literature examining the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) We review the history of privatization, the theoretical and empirical evidence on the relative performance of state owned and privately owned firms, the types of privatization, if and by how much privatization has improved the performance of former SOEs in non-transition and transition countries, how investors in privatizations have fared, and the impact of privatization on the development of capital markets and corporate governance. In most settings privatization “works” in that the firms become more efficient, more profitable, and financially healthier, and reward investors.

Entrepreneurship is thought to be a key driver of economic growth. While there are myriad forms of entrepreneurship, ranging from self-employment to small and medium size enterprises to technology- and innovation-driven startups, recent research provides evidence that the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth is driven not by overall quantity of new firm entry, but rather by a small subset of high-growth startups that are primarily categorized as innovation-driven. This paper provides a survey of the growing literature on the economics of such innovation-driven entrepreneurship. We begin by distinguishing between the various forms of entrepreneurship, which are often confounded in both theory and empirical work. We lay out the current state of knowledge, and describe the challenges faced by researchers in the field, particularly around measurement, data and identification. We conclude with an overview of the major open questions and directions for future research in the area.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.