Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, and 1995 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm...

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real...

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

This paper documents trends over the last two decades in retirement behavior and retirement income choices by participants in TIAA, a large and mature defined contribution plan with a wide range of withdrawal options. Between 2000 and 2018, the average retirement age rose by approximately 1.3...

The 'China shock' operated in part through the housing market, and that is an important reason why the China shock was as big as it was. If housing prices had not responded at all to the China shock, then the total employment effect of the China shock would have been reduced by more than...

This paper is the first attempt to structurally estimate the impact of globalization on markups, and the effect of changing markups on welfare, in a monopolistic competition model. To achieve this, we work with a class of preferences that allow for endogenous markups and firm entry and exit that...

Since 1995, growth in productivity in the United States appears to have accelerated dramatically. In this paper, we argue that part of this apparent speed-up actually represents gains in the terms of trade and tariff reductions, especially for information-technology products. We demonstrate how...

In the second-half of the 1990s, the positive impact of information technology on productivity growth for the United States became apparent. The measurement of this productivity improvement depends on hedonic procedures adopted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Economic...

This paper describes the updating of the NBER trade dataset, which now provides U.S. import and export values to the year 2001, disaggregated by Harmonized System (HS), Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), and the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories. In...