This paper examines the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on the federal funds market, specifically the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Rather than a complete collapse of lending in the presence of a market wide shock, we see that banks become more restrictive in which counterparties they...

There are two ways to eliminate this distortion toward successful fiscal restoration. One of them is to make the monetary authority more conservative than society in the sense that the price stability weight of monetary authority is higher than that of society. The other way of eliminating the...

This paper uses data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the Current Population Surveys to document the differential shifts that occurred in the wage structures of the public and privatesectors between 1960 and 2000. The wage gap between the typical public sector worker and a comparable private...

This paper examines the role of output stabilization in the conduct of monetary policy. It argues that activist monetary policy in which the monetary authorities focus on output fluctuations in the setting of their policy instrument and in policy statements is likely to produce worse outcomes...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...

In this paper we analyze the operation of the inter-war gold exchange standard to see if the evident credibility of the system conferred on participating central banks the ability to pursue independent monetary policies. To answer this question we econometrically analyze two key parity, or...

This paper compares trends in male and female hourly wage inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1979 and 1998. Our main finding is that the extent and pattern of wage inequality became increasingly similar in the two countries during this period. We attribute this...

This paper conducts counterfactual historical analysis of several monetary policy rules by contrasting actual settings of instrument variables with values that would have been specified by the rules in response to prevailing conditions. Of particular interest is whether major policy mistakes,...

Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...