The inequality dataset compiled in the 1990s by the World Bank and extended by the UN has been both widely used and strongly criticized. The criticisms raise questions about conclusions drawn from secondary inequality datasets in general. We develop techniques to deal with national and...

A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might - at...

We use evidence from the term structure of inflation expectations implicit in the nominal yields and survey forecasts of inflation to address the question of whether or not monetary policy is effective. We construct a model that accommodates forecasts over multiple horizons from multiple surveys...

This is the first Paper that looks at regional tax competition within one single country. In many countries in Europe, regions within a country differ substantially in their economic development and attractiveness to firms. Belgium is a typical example of a country where the economic situation...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

We study firm-level pricing behavior through the lens of exchange rate pass-through and provide new evidence on how firm-level market shares and price complementarities affect pass-through decisions. Using micro-data from U.S. import prices, we identify two facts: First, exactly the firms that...

In this paper we estimate a New-Keynesian DSGE model with heterogeneity in price and wage setting behavior. In a recent study, Coibion and Gorodnichenko (2011) develop a DSGE model, in which firms follow four different types of price setting schemes: sticky prices, sticky information, rule of...

One of the central questions in recent macroeconomic history is to what extent monetary policy as opposed to oil price shocks contributed to the stagflation of the 1970s. Understanding what went wrong in the 1970s is the key to learning from the past. One explanation explored in Barsky and...

We show that deviations from long-run stability of product prices are optimal in the presence of endogenous producer entry and product variety in a sticky-price model with monopolistic competition in which price stability would be optimal in the absence of entry. Specifically, a long-run...

This paper argues that limited asset market participation is crucial in explaining U.S. macroeconomic performance and monetary policy before the 1980s, and their changes thereafter. We develop an otherwise standard sticky-price DSGE model, whereby at low enough asset market participation,...