Social institutions were often founded by the elite to avoid social upheavals. Institutions helped mitigate the threat of violent social responses to labor-saving innovations. But their organizational forms were influenced by preexisting cultural and social factors. The differences in Chinese...

Using panel data for a large set of high-income, emerging market, developing, and transition countries, we find robust evidence that the large output loss from financial crises and some types of political crises is highly persistent. The results on financial crises are also highly robust to the...

Modern growth theory suggests that more than three-quarters of growth since 1950 reflects rising educational attainment and research intensity. As these transition dynamics fade, US economic growth is likely to slow at some point. However, the rise of China, India, and other emerging economies...

We examine the degree to which federal fiscal integration smoothes income and unemployment shocks across US States. We find that roughly 25 cents of every dollar of income shock at the state level is offset by federal fiscal policy. This stabilization comes entirely through the Federal tax...

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...

Has government spending raised income and employment since 2008? I use new data on state pension returns during the Great Recession to recover exogenous changes in spending. Instrumenting with these return shocks, I estimate that each dollar of windfall-financed spending raised local incomes by...