Features of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program and the social security retirement system may interact in a manner that creates incentives for prospective SSI recipients to take social security early retirement (SSER). This paper takes a first close look at this issue. The work...

We examine the effects of must-access prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) and recent regulations limiting the duration of initial opioid prescriptions on care received by patients with work-related injuries, focusing on opioid utilization and medical care related to pain management. We...

Recent policy debate on minimum wages has focused not only on raising the minimum wage, but on eliminating the tip credit for restaurant workers. We use data on past variation in tip credits - or minimum wages for restaurant workers - to provide evidence on the potential impacts of eliminating...

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...

The disagreement among studies of the employment effects of minimum wages in the United States is well known. What is less well known, and more puzzling, is the absence of agreement on what the research literature says - that is, how economists even summarize the body of evidence on the...

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...