In a rare example of an explicit national goal for income distribution besides reducing poverty, China's leadership has recently committed to expanding the middle-income share--moving to a less polarized "olive-shaped" distribution. Recognizing the potential trade-offs, the paper asks whether...

Education and income are strong predictors of health and longevity. In the last 20 years many efforts have been made to understand if these relationships are causal and what the possible role of policy should be as a result. The evidence from various studies is ambiguous: the effects of...

Disappointing recent growth rates, the emergence of structurally unfavorable income and employment conditions, and important institutional changes in the international trading environment have caused policy officials in the advanced industrial nations to reconsider the proper mix of reactive...

Along with house rents, wages have frequently been described as the "stickiest" prices in the economy, rarely adjusted more than once a year. Because of this stickiness (which arises from the transactions costs involved in changing wages), a distinction exists between the adjustment of wages and...

We characterize the macroeconomic performance of a set of industrialized economies in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and of the last decade, focusing on the differences across episodes. We examine four different hypotheses for the mild effects on inflation and economic...

Wage and price controls have a long and somewhat disreputable history, presumably because of their frequent use in many countries as short run substitutes for measure~ with more lasting effects on the inflation rate. But, in 1985 and 1986, Argentina, Brazil, and Israel used extensive wage-price...

This paper utilizes a unique dataset collected through site visits to extend the analysis of the relationship between the human resource management environment and establishment performance to the service sector, specifically the branch operations of a large bank. Case studies of several...

We argue that greater misallocation is a key driver of the worse management practices in Mexico compared to the US. These management practices are strongly associated with higher productivity, growth, trade, and innovation. One indicator of greater misallocation in Mexico is the weaker...

Applications for new businesses from the U.S. Census Bureau's monthly and weekly Business Formation Statistics (BFS) fell substantially in the early stages of the pandemic but then surged in the second half of 2020. This surge has continued through May 2021. The pace of applications since...