This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has been associated with lower growth than expected. The relation is particularly strong, both...

This paper asks whether the slow recovery of the US economy from the trough of the Great Recession was anticipated, and identifies some of the factors that contributed to surprises in the course of the recovery. We construct a narrative using news reports and government announcements to identify...

Do laboratory subjects correctly perceive the dynamics of a mean-reverting time series? In our experiment, subjects receive historical data and make forecasts at different horizons. The time series process that we use features short-run momentum and long-run partial mean reversion. Half of the...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty. Our estimates display significant independent variations from popular uncertainty proxies, suggesting that much of the variation in the proxies is not driven by...

In this paper, I try to shed some new light on the "puzzle" of why the Lucas critique, believed to be important by most economists, seems to have received very little empirical support. I use a real-business-cycle model to verify that the Lucas critique is quantitatively important in theory, and...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different...

A key feature of arbitration is the possibility for con icting parties to participate in the selection of the arbitrator, the individual who will rule the case. We analyze this problem of the selection of arbitrators from the perspective of implementation theory. In particular, theoretical...

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

We analyze randomized online survey experiments providing interactive, customized information on US income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality but only slightly moves tax and transfer...