In a model with cheap talk, employers can send messages about their willingness to pay for higher ability workers, which job-seekers can use to direct their search and tailor their wage bid. Introducing such messages leads--under certain conditions--to an informative separating equilibrium which...

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. Econometric studies in this area report a plethora of sometimes confusing and frequently...

Is public R&D spending complementary and thus "additional" to private R&D spending, or does it substitute for and tend to "crowd out" private R&D? Conflicting answers are given to this question. We survey the body of available economectric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years. A framework...

Conventional wisdom in the field of international finance holds that the U.S. economy has become so open financiallly as to be characterized by perfect capital mobility: a highly elastic supply of foreign capital prevents the domestic rate of return from rising significantly above the world rate...

The paper studies the relationship between public sector financial deficits, crowding-out of public sector capital formation and inflation in a number of small, classical macroeconomic models. This amounts to reworking some of the government budget constraint literature by including capacity...

The prevailing view of the economic consequences of financing government deficits, as reflected in the recent economics literature and in recent public policy debates, reflects serious misunderstandings. Debt-financed deficits need not "crowd out" any private investment, and may even "crowd in"...

We examine the negative relationship between the rate of growth in credit and the rate of growth in output per worker. Using a panel of 20 countries over 25 years, we establish that there is a robust correlation: the higher the growth rate of credit, the lower the growth rate of output per...

Business cycle recoveries have slowed in recent decades. This slowdown comes entirely from female employment: as women's employment rates converged towards men's over the past half-century, the growth rate of female employment slowed. We ask whether this slowdown in female employment caused the...

Big G typically refers to aggregate government spending on a homogeneous good. In this paper, we open up this construct by analyzing the entire universe of procurement contracts of the US government and establish five facts. First, government spending is granular, that is, it is concentrated in...