We examine the efficacy of affirmative action at universities whose value depends on peer and alumni networks. We study an elite Brazilian university that adopted race- and income-based affirmative action at a large scale. Using employer-employee data, we show that a key benefit of attending the...

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...

In this paper we analyse a new Phillips curve (NPC) model and demonstrate that (i) frictional growth, i.e. the interplay of wage-staggering and money growth, generates a nonvertical NPC in the long-run, and (ii) the Phillips curve (PC) shifts with productivity growth. On this basis we estimate a...

This paper analyses the relation between US inflation and unemployment from the perspective of "frictional growth," a phenomenon arising from the interplay between growth and frictions. In particular, we examine the interaction between money growth (on the one hand) and various real and nominal...

This paper addresses the various methodological issues surrounding vector autoregressions, simultaneous equations, and chain reactions, and provides new evidence on the long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff in the US. It is argued that money growth is a superior indicator of the monetary...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, based on "frictional growth" describing the interplay between nominal frictions and money growth. When the money supply grows in the presence of price inertia (due to staggered wage contracts with time discounting), the...

Introducing a new survey of U.S. firms' inflation expectations, we document key stylized facts involving what U.S. firms know and expect about inflation and monetary policy. The resulting time series of firms' inflation expectations displays unique dynamics, distinct from those of households and...

On their intensive margins, firms in the British engineering industry adjusted to the severe falls in demand during the 1930s Depression by cutting hours of work. This provided an important means of reducing labour input and marginal labour costs, through movements from overtime to short-time...

We document a new fact: in U.S., European and Japanese surveys, households do not expect deflation, even in environments where persistent deflation is a strong possibility. This fact stands in contrast to the standard macroeconomic models with rational expectations. We extend a standard New...

We implement a survey of Dutch households in which random subsets of respondents receive information about inflation. The resulting exogenously generated variation in inflation expectations is used to assess how expectations affect subsequent monthly consumption decisions relative to those in a...