In an influential paper, Baily (1978) showed that the optimal level of unemployment insurance (UI) in a stylized static model depends on only three parameters: risk aversion, the consumption-smoothing benefit of UI, and the elasticity of unemployment durations with respect to the benefit rate....

Proponents of globalization often conclude that its critics are ignorant or self-motivated. In doing so, they have missed a valuable opportunity to discover both how best to communicate the benefits of globalization, and how to improve on the current model of globalization. This paper examines...

Many of the lessons from foreign direct investment (FDI) research on manufacturing and extractive resource industries are applicable to financial-sector FDI. This paper reviews the main findings and policy themes of FDI research, with a primary focus on the host country implications of FDI for...

The U.S. corporate governance system has recently been heavily criticized, largely as a result of failures at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and some other prominent companies. Those failures and criticisms, in turn, have served as catalysts for legislative change (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) and...

Applied general equilibrium (AGE) models, which feature multiple countries, multiple industries, and input-output linkages across industries, have been the dominant tool for evaluating the impact of trade reforms since the 1980s. We review how these models are used to perform policy analysis and...

The effects of supply-side policies in depressed economies are controversial. We shed light on this debate using evidence from France in the 1930s. In 1936, France departed from the gold standard and implemented mandatory wage increases and hours restrictions. Deflation ended but output...

Over the past thirty years, a great deal of business cycle research has been based on purely real models that abstract from the presence of nominal rigidities, and so (at least implicitly) assume that the Phillips curve is vertical. In this paper, I show that such models are fragile, in the...

In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty uses the market value of tradeable assets to measure both productive capital and wealth. As a measure of wealth this is problematic because it ignores the value of human capital and transfer wealth, which have grown enormously over the last 300...

In his influential book, Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty argues forcefully that rising wealth and wealth inequality is an inherent characteristic of capitalist economies and calls for strong policy responses, in particular a substantial wealth tax implemented globally. This paper...