Do urban children live more segregated lives than urban adults? Using cellphone location data and following the 'experienced isolation' methodology of Athey et al. (2021), we compare the isolation of students over the age of 16--who we identify based on their time spent at a high school--and...

This paper argues that the key deep underlying fundamental for the growing international imbalances leading to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system between 1971 and 1973 was rising U.S. inflation since 1965. It was driven in turn by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies--the elephant in...

How effective are restrictions on mobility in limiting COVID-19 spread? Using zip code data across five U.S. cities, we estimate that total cases per capita decrease by 20% for every ten percentage point fall in mobility. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we instrument for travel by residential...

For over two centuries, the municipal bond market has been a source of systemic risk, which returned early in the Covid-19 downturn when borrowing from securities markets became costly for many private and public entities, and some found it difficult to borrow at all. Indeed, just before the Fed...

The dollar's depreciation during the early floating rate period, 1973 - 1981, was a symptom of the Great Inflation. In that environment, sterilized foreign exchange interventions were ineffective in halting the dollar's decline, but showed a limited ability to smooth dollar movements. Only after...

In this paper we revisit the debate over the role of the banking panics in 1930-33 in precipitating the Great Contraction. The issue hinges over whether the panics were illiquidity shocks and hence in support of Friedman and Schwartz (1963) greatly exacerbated the recession which had begun in...

The Federal Reserve abandoned foreign-exchange-market intervention because it conflicted with the System's commitment to price stability. By the early 1980s, economists generally concluded that, absent a portfolio-balance channel, sterilized foreign-exchange-market intervention did not provide...

In this paper we provide some evidence on when central banks have shifted from expansionary to contractionary monetary policy after a recession has ended--the exit strategy. We examine the relationship between the timing of changes in several instruments of monetary policy and the timing of...

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,...