Monetary Policy and Asset Valuation: Evidence From a Markov-Switching cay --...
This paper presents evidence of infrequent shifts, or "breaks," in the mean of the consumption-wealth variable cay_{t}, an asset market valuation ratio driven by fluctuations in stock market wealth...
View ArticleA Time to Make Laws and a Time to Fundraise? On the Relation between Salaries...
Paying higher salaries is often believed to enhance worker effort, leading workers to work harder to avoid getting fired. However, workers may also respond to higher salaries by focusing on tasks that...
View ArticleThe Political Economy of Debt and Entitlements -- by Laurent Bouton,...
This paper presents a dynamic political-economic model of total government obligations. Its focus is on the interplay between debt and entitlements. In our model, both are tools by which temporarily...
View ArticleImputation in U.S. Manufacturing Data and Its Implications for Productivity...
In the U.S. Census Bureau's 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Manufactures 79% and 73% of observations respectively have imputed data for at least one variable used to compute total factor productivity. The...
View ArticleLegal Access to Alcohol and Criminality -- by Benjamin Hansen, Glen R. Waddell
Previous research has found strong evidence that legal access to alcohol is associated with sizable increases in criminality. We revisit this relationship using the census of judicial records on...
View ArticleIsrael and the 1990-2015 Global Developments: Riding with the Global Flows...
The global economy has been buffeted by several unprecedented economic events during the past 35 years. We survey the impact of these events on Israel's development, institutions, and economic...
View ArticlePredicting Experimental Results: Who Knows What? -- by Stefano DellaVigna,...
Academic experts frequently recommend policies and treatments. But how well do they anticipate the impact of different treatments? And how do their predictions compare to the predictions of...
View ArticleExclusion Bias in the Estimation of Peer Effects -- by Bet Caeyers, Marcel...
We formalize a noted [Guryan et al., 2009] but unexplored source of bias in peer effect estimation, arising because people cannot be their own peer. We derive, for linear-in-means models with...
View ArticleThe Effects of Unemployment Insurance Benefits: New Evidence and...
The Great Recession has renewed interest in Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs around the world. At the same time, there have been important advances in both theory and measurement of UI. In this...
View ArticleThe Effect of Unconventional Fiscal Policy on Consumption Expenditure -- by...
Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time...
View ArticleHealthy-Time Measures of Health Outcomes and Healthcare Quality -- by...
The purposes of this paper are to describe some conceptual and empirical foundations of "healthy-time" measures of health outcomes or healthcare quality, and to explore how to expand the empirical...
View ArticleThe Effects of the Early Retirement Age on Retirement Decisions -- by...
We present quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of increasing the Early Retirement Age (ERA) on older workers' retirement decisions. The analysis is based on social security reforms in Austria in...
View ArticleAfrica's Prospects for Enjoying a Demographic Dividend -- by David E. Bloom,...
We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa remain high, they have started to decline. According to UN projections, they will...
View ArticleMatch or Mismatch? Automatic Admissions and College Preferences of Low- and...
We examine the role of information in the college matching behavior of low- and high-income students, exploiting a state automatic admissions policy that provides some students with perfect a priori...
View ArticleDo Low Levels of Blood Lead Reduce Children's Future Test Scores? -- by Anna...
We construct a unique individual-level longitudinal dataset linking preschool blood lead levels with third grade test scores for eight birth cohorts of Rhode Island children born between 1997 and 2005....
View ArticleThe Economic Consequences of the 1953 London Debt Agreement -- by Gregori...
In 1953 the Western Allied powers implemented a radical debt-relief plan that would, in due course, eliminate half of West Germany's external debt and create a series of favourable debt repayment...
View ArticleSocial Capital, Trust and Well-being in the Evaluation of Wealth -- by Kirk...
We combine theory with data from different domains to provide an empirical analysis of the scale and variability of social capital as wealth. This is used to argue, given what we have learned in the...
View ArticleThe Outlook for U.S. Labor-Quality Growth -- by Canyon Bosler, Mary C. Daly,...
Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong--defying nearly all earlier projections--and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S. productivity picture....
View ArticleSmoke Gets in Your Eyes: Medical Marijuana Laws and Tobacco Use -- by Anna...
This study comprehensively examines whether medical marijuana laws (MMLs) have affected the trajectory of a decades-long decline in adult tobacco use in the United States. Using data from three large...
View ArticleWho Should Own and Control Urban Water Systems? Historical Evidence from...
Nearly 40% of England's privately built waterworks were municipalised in the late 19th century. We examine how this affected public health by pairing annual mortality data for over 600 registration...
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