We study the effects of labor market liberalization on political behavior and attitudes towards free-market capitalism and socialism, exploiting a reform whereby the Israeli socialist communities called kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to market-based wages. Our identification strategy...

Concurrent with the precipitous decline in private sector unionization over the past half century, there has been a shift in the type of work covered by unions. We take a skill-based approach to studying this shift, using data from the Current Population Survey combined with occupation-specific...

We study the descriptive and substantive representation of workers through worker representatives, focusing on the selection of German works council representatives and their impact on worker outcomes. Becoming a professional representative leads to substantial wage gains for the elected,...

What model features and calibration strategies yield a large average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) in heterogeneous agent models? Through a systematic investigation of models with different preferences, dimensions of ex-ante heterogeneity, income processes and asset structure, we show...

This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...

We consider a New Keynesian model with downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) and show that government spending is much more effective in stimulating output in a low-inflation recession relative to a high-inflation recession. The government spending multiplier is large when DNWR binds, but the...

This paper studies the transmission channels of monetary and macroprudential policies in an open economy framework and evaluates the normative implications for international spillovers and global welfare. An analytical decomposition uncovers the prominent role of expenditure switching for...

We study three centuries of U.K. fiscal history. Before WW-I, when the U.K. dominated global bond markets, the U.K.'s government debt was not always fully backed by its future surpluses, even after accounting for the seigniorage revenue from convenience yields. As predicted by theories of safe...

We model a reinsurance mechanism for the national unemployment insurance programs of euro area member states. The risk-sharing scheme we analyze is designed to smooth country-level unemployment risk and expenditures around each country's median level, so that participation and contributions...

The post-COVID price surge has reignited interest in inflation's impact on American households. Even if anticipated and with full market adjustments, inflation affects households through its interaction with the fiscal system, which is the focus of this paper. Inflation affects households...