We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of the fasting period due to the rotating Islamic calendar. We report two key, quantitatively...

During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the amount of the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0, a range...

The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth, both in common practice and in the law, rather than alternative measures reflecting a person's stage in the lifecycle distorts important behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency ratios. Two alternative...

This paper examines the likely growth of U.S. GDP in the decade beginning in 2010. I analyze the two components of the rise in GDP over this ten year period: (1) the recovery from the substantially depressed level of economic activity at the start of the decade; and (2) the rise in potential GDP that...

This paper uses the neoclassical growth model to examine the extent to which a tax cut pays for itself through higher economic growth. The model yields simple expressions for the steady-state feedback effect of a tax cut. The feedback is surprisingly large: for standard parameter values, half of...

This paper is concerned with the growth of individual earnings over time. Four aspects of time are distinguished: experience, age, vintage and calendar year. The first section of the paper provides a brief outline of a theory of planned growth in earnings. The second and main section of the...

During the past decade, much has been said about the role that on-the-job training plays in augmenting one's stock of human capital. Up to this point, little has been done to distinguish the effect of on-the-job training from that of aging on the increase in human wealth. The reason rests...

This paper studies the evolution of income concentration in Japan from 1886 to 2002 by constructing long-run series of top income shares and top wage income shares, using income tax statistics. We find that (1) income concentration was extremely high throughout the pre-WWII period during which...