China's high national savings rate-one of the highest in the world-is at the heart of its external/internal imbalances. High savings finance elevated investment when held domestically, or lead to large external imbalances when they flow abroad. Today, high savings mostly emanate from the...

We develop a heterogeneous agent, overlapping generations model with nonhomothetic preferences that nests several explanations for the decline in the natural rate of interest (r∗) suggested in the literature: demographic change, a slowdown in productivity growth, a rise in income inequality,...

Undocumented migration from the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) to the United States has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years, accelerating at times. The paper investigates what factors could explain this fact, by estimating an investment decision...

In this paper, we undertake empirical analysis to understand U.S. wage behavior since thebeginning of the new millennium. At the macroeconomic level, we find that aproductivity-augmented Phillips curve model explains the data fairly well. The modelreveals that the upward pressure on wage growth...

This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings...

This paper presents novel empirical evidence on the labor market integration of migrants across Europe. It investigates how successfully migrants integrate in 13 European countries by applying a unified framework to analyze a rich micro dataset with over ten million individuals surveyed between...

This paper uses a life-cycle framework to document new stylized facts about the nexus between job polarization and earnings inequality. Using quarterly labor force data for the UK over the period 2000-2018, we find clear life-cycle profiles in the probability of being employed within each...

In this paper, we examine how economic shocks affect the distribution of household inflation expectations. We show that the dynamics of households' expected inflation distributions are driven by three distinctive functional shocks, which influence the expected inflation distribution through...

We use a decomposition methodology to analyze the factors underlying the differentiated output losses of European countries in 2020. Our findings are fourfold: First, 2020 growth outcomes can be explained by differences in mobility, underlying growth trends, and pre-pandemic country...

The paper extends the work of Deaton (2021) by exploring the period of post-crisis recovery in 2021-2024. The paper documents per-capita income divergence during the period of post-shock recovery, with countries at the bottom of the income distribution falling significantly behind. Findings...