Recent attempts to incorporate optimal fiscal policy into NewKeynesian models subject to nominal inertia, have tended to assume that policymakers are benevolent and have access to a commitment technology. A separateliterature, on the New Political Economy, has focused on real economies...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar’s long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. Idescribe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, withdistinguished economists’ stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar’s goal is to show howeconomists work, but also...

The robust empirical finding that exporting firms are systematically different from firms thatmerely serve domestic consumers has inspired the development of a new brand of tradetheory, the theory of heterogeneous firms and trade. The establishment of a canonical modeldue to Melitz (2003) has...

Immer wieder wird in der wirtschaftspolitischen Debatte behauptet, dass überhöhte Arbeitskosten die entscheidendeWurzel der hohen Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland seien. Eine neuere Untersuchung des Institutsder deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) scheint dessen frühere Ergebnisse zu bestätigen, wonach...

This paper compares the mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) and mixed-frequency VAR(MF-VAR) approaches to model speci…cation in the presence of mixed-frequency data,e.g., monthly and quarterly series. MIDAS leads to parsimonious models based onexponential lag polynomials for the coe¢ cients, whereas...