This paper explores the quantitative plausibility of three candidate explanations for the European productivity slowdown with respect to the US. The empirical plausibility of the common wisdom on the topic (the IT usageʺ hypothesis) is found to crucially depend on how IT-using industries are...

Public finance has both normative and positive elements, and moving between theory and practice requires attention to help us understand both what policies government should adopt and whether it is likely to do so. We should not be surprised when bad policies are adopted in spite of better...

This paper surveys the economic wreckage created by Wall Street's decision to manufacture and sell trillions of dollars of financial securities, which we now call toxic. And we call them toxic, not because they were risky, but because they were fraudulent. Rather than address the fundamental...

The recent financial crisis and the historical record suggest important lessons about the design of national pension systems. First, wide fluctuations in asset returns make it hard for well-informed savers to select a saving rate or a sensible investment strategy for defined-contribution (DC)...

We survey three distinct types of financial crises which took place in the 1990s and the 2000s: (i) The credit implosion leading to severe banking crisis in Japan, (ii) The foreign reserves’ meltdown triggered by foreign hot money flight from frothy economies with fixed exchange rate regimes...

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a unified framework. We consider a data set of exports from individual US...