The second half of the 1990s has seen substantialchanges in the wealth of Americanhouseholds, primarily owing to movements inthe stock market. From mid-1994 to mid-1997, the aggregate value of household sector equityholdings (including those owned by nonprofits, mutualfunds, and pensions and...

[...]The issue of the links between poverty, health, and accessto medical care is one that has received considerable attentionfrom a variety of perspectives.1 Health influences mostother activities of life, from the ability to engage in learningto the ability to enjoy life itself. It is...

[...]In the time that I have been at Health andHuman Services, one of the things I have learned is thatthe public health profession has quite a lot to teach policymakers.That is something many New Yorkers learnedearlier this decade when Dr. Margaret Hamburg was NewYork City’s health...

[...]We consider two puzzles about the local safety netand New York City. First, why do big cities, and particularlyNew York, engage in so much more redistribution thansmall towns? The broad question (the connection betweencities and redistribution) is the topic of the companionpaper to this one...

Many papers have shown that U.S. earnings inequalityincreased substantially from about 1980 to around 1996.1Recent and careful studies agree that a basic explanationfor increased earnings inequality is the rising returns tohuman capital resulting from new technology. These risingreturns have...

[...]We begin by discussing the so-called first generation ofmodels, in which crises are viewed in the literature as theunavoidable result of unsustainable policies or fundamentalimbalances. Next, we survey the literature on the secondgeneration of models, which highlights the possibility of...

[...]The task facing the Eurosystem is even morecomplex than that facing countries with stable monetaryregimes, where the measurement of the national andregional impact of policy has already proved to be extremelydifficult. The creation of the Eurosystem constitutes aregime shift in virtually...