Although there is much interest in the future retail price of gasoline among consumers, industry analysts, and policymakers, it is widely believed that changes in the price of gasoline are essentially unforecastable given publicly available information. We explore several new forecasting...

We examine the quantitative predictions of heterogeneous firm models à la Melitz (2003) in the context of the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) of 1989. We compute predicted increases in trade flows and measured productivity across a range of standard models and compare them to the...

We propose a theory of tax centralization and inter governmental grants in politico-economic equilibrium. The cost of taxation differs across levels of government because voters internalize general equilibrium effects at the central but not at the local level. This renders the degree of tax...

Technological progress builds upon itself, with the expansion of invention in one domain propelling future work in linked fields. Our analysis uses 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties to map the innovation network and its strength. Past innovation network structures are...

This paper identifies a new factor, the age of the housing stock, that affects where high- and low-income neighborhoods are located in U.S. cities. High-income households, driven by a high demand for housing services, will tend to locate in areas of the city where the housing stock is relatively...

Rising government debt levels around the world are raising the specter that authorities might seek to inflate away the debt. In theoretical settings where fiscal policy "dominates"monetary policy, higher debt without offsetting changes in primary surpluses should lead households to anticipate...

We compare the causal effects of forward guidance communication about future interest rates on households' expectations of inflation, mortgage rates, and unemployment to the effects of communication about future inflation in a randomized controlled trial using more than 25,000 U.S. individuals...

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation-based indexes that could be used to rank academics. This paper examines how well several such indexes match labor market outcomes using data on the citation records of young tenured economists at 25 U.S. departments. Variants of...

Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge Curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching...

U3, the official unemployment rate, is an inadequate gauge of labor-market slack and the extent to which it misinforms varies substantially over the business cycle. The U6 unemployment rate is usually about 4 percentage points above U3. However, during the Great Recession it exceeded U3 by 7...