This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is really an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but...

This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

In recent years, the renewed strength of immigration to the United States has sparked a debate about the economic effects of immigration. A central issue in this debate has been the fiscal impact of immigrants. Most research in this area has adopted a static, cross-section approach in assessing...

This paper investigates forecasts of U.S. inflation at the 12-month horizon. The starting point is the conventional unemployment rate Phillips curve, which is examined in a simulated out of sample forecasting framework. Inflation forecasts produced by the Phillips curve generally have been more...

We summarize the history of U.S. coal-fired plant retirements over the last decade, describe planned future retirements, and forecast the remaining operating life for every operating coal-fired generator. We summarize the technology and location trends that are correlated with the observed...

This paper quantifies the amount of noise and bias in analysts' forecast of corporate earnings at various horizons. We first show analyst forecasts outperform statistical forecasts at short-horizons, but underperform at longer horizons. We next decompose the relative accuracy of these forecasts...

We use discounted cash flow analysis to measure a country's fiscal capacity. Crucially, the discount rate applied to projected cash flows includes a GDP risk premium. We apply our valuation method to the CBO's projections for the U.S. federal government's deficit between 2022 and 2051 and debt...