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...

In the twenty-first century many of the professional and high ranking managerial workers in the United States and in other OECD countries will be women. This change in women's social and economic status represents a dramatic break with the past, but one that can only be understood by looking to...

We constructed a time series of menu prices for the identifiable restaurants at which James Bond dined in France and the UK that yields one of the few international price series representing luxury services. This series enabled us to calculate a real exchange rate based on prices pertinent to...

This paper examines the distribution of the values of patent rights in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany during the post-1950 period. These values are inferred from the behavior of patentees with respect to payment of renewal fees on their patents. A simple economic model of renewal...

This working paper presents Chapter 7 of a book to be published for the National Bureau of Economic Research by the University of Chicago Press. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital in four countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and...

This working paper presents Chapter 2 of a book that has been submitted to the University of Chicago Press for publication consideration. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital infour countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and including...

Many households hold little wealth, especially liquid wealth. In precautionary savings models, absent preference heterogeneity, these households should display not only higher marginal propensities to consume (MPCs), but also lower average propensities to consume (APCs) and higher future...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

Using original data from two waves of a survey conducted in March and April 2020 in eight OECD countries (N = 21,649), we show that women are more likely to see COVID-19 as a very serious health problem, to agree with restraining public policy measures adopted in response to it, and to comply...