This article, based on two books (Barr and Diamond 2008, forthcoming), sets out a series of principles for pension design rooted in economic theory: pension systems have multiple objectives, analysis should consider the pension system as a whole, analysis should be framed in a second-best...

This report is the first policy study of the China Economic Research and AdvisoryProgramme, in which eminent economists from China and abroad have participated. Thereport focuses on the problems faced by China in the reform of its social security system.On the basis of economic principles and...

Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood. Recent evidence hasshown a socio-economic gradient in its distribution. This paper examineswhether a number of factors argued to have led to a rise in the incidence ofasthma might also explain the social gradient. Several of these have been...

[...]This article provides a systematic evaluation of severalproposed measures of U.S. core inflation: the popular ex foodand energy series, an ex energy series, a weighted median series,and an exponentially smoothed series. To inform the currentdebate on this issue, we adopt a general framework...

[...]What explains New York’s ongoing ability to dominateAmerica’s urban landscape? In this paper, we explore theeconomic history of the city and argue that three themesemerge. First, New York’s emergence as the nation’s premier port was not the result of happenstance followed by...

[...]This paper builds primarily on research on agglomerationeconomies. Much of the empirical work on agglomeration hassought to estimate the effect on productivity of anestablishment’s local environment. The estimation hassometimes involved direct estimates of productivity(Henderson 2003) and...

[...]This paper empirically examines the spatial and temporalresponses of the New York City economy to a large, butspatially concentrated, exogenous shock to its capital stock:the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Our focus on thecity’s response allows us to draw inferences about how...

[...]This paper documents the impact of recent changes inimmigration settlement patterns on the skill endowment ofimmigrants in the New York metropolitan area. The empiricalanalysis uses the available U.S. census microdata between 1970and 2000 to examine two related questions that inevitably lie...

[...]This paper examines the operation of the U.S. labor marketin the 2001 recovery. Because the United States is in the middleof the recovery, ours is a real-time analysis; thus, someconclusions could change if the recovery stalls or employmentgrows suddenly. For instance, since August 2003,...

[...]This study assesses what actually happened—that is,whether well-paid jobs have been disappearing in Canada inrecent years.[...]