American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country's most persistent pockets of joblessness. Could a more even spatial distribution of innovation reduce American joblessness? Could Federal policies disperse innovation without...

Are the well-known facts about urbanization in the United States also true for the developing world? We compare American metropolitan areas with comparable geographic units in Brazil, China and India. Both Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law seem to hold as well in Brazil as in the U.S., but China and...

Using a sample of Harvard undergraduates, we analyze trust and social capital in two experiments. Trusting behavior and trustworthiness rise with social connection; differences in race and nationality reduce the level of trustworthiness. Certain individuals appear to be persistently more...

In the new situation with flexible exchange rates, monetary policy in Europe will have to rely more on indicators than previously under fixed rates. One of the potential indicators, the forward interest rate curve, can be used to indicate market expectations of the time-paths of future short...

Alfred Marshall argues that industrial agglomerations exist in part because individuals can" learn skills from each other when they live and work in close proximity to one another. An" increasing amount of evidence suggests that the informational role of cities is a primary reason for" their...

Policy rules that are consistent with inflation targeting are examined in a small macroeconomic model of the US economy. We compare the properties and outcomes of explicit instrument rules' as well as targeting rules.' The latter, which imply implicit instrument rules, may be closer to actual...