During the financial crisis that started in 2007, the U.S. government has used a variety of tools to try to rehabilitate the U.S. banking industry. Many of those strategies were used also in Japan to combat its banking problems in the 1990s. There are also a surprising number of other...

We examine local labor markets in the U.S. and Canada from 1990 to 2011 using comparable household and business data. Wage levels and inequality rise with city population in both countries, albeit less in Canada. Neither country saw wage levels converge despite contrasting migration patterns...

We study the effects of import and export competition on collectively bargained wage settlements and bargaining unit employment from the sixties to the mid-eighties for the United States and Canada. Both value-based and pricebased measures of international competition are considered. We...

In this paper, we decompose oil price changes into their component parts following Kilian (2009) and estimate the dynamic effects of each component on industry-level production and prices in the U.S. and Japan using identified VAR models. The way oil price changes affect each industry depends on...

The objective of this paper is two-fold. First, we describe and compare the gift and bequest (estate) tax systems in the United States and Japan. Second, we use tax data to estimate the magnitude of intergenerational transfers. The magnitude of intergenerational transfers provides aid in...

Are location-specific factors--such as the education and attitude of the local workforce, supplier networks, institutional infrastructure, and local "culture"--important for understanding persistent heterogeneities among firms? We address this question in the context of the automobile industry....

To help shed light on the implications of intergenerational transfers for wealth inequality, this paper examines whether or not individuals who receive intergenerational transfers from their parents are more likely to leave bequests to their children than those who do not using data for Japan...

The Japanese are becoming older. Americans are also becoming older. Demographic stress in Japan, measured by the dependency ratio (DR), is currently about 0.64. In the immediate pre-WWII era it was even higher because Japan's total fertility rate (TFR) was in the 4 to 5 range. As the TFR began...

Measures of productivity growth typically include in the Productivity "residual" the impacts of subequilibrium from fixity of factors, costs of adjustment, returns to scale and markups. This paper proposes a general two part framework for adjusting the residual measure to take these impacts into...

This paper examines the historical origins of "Original Sin" or why countries are unable to issue long term debt domestically or borrow abroad in terms of the domestic currency. We conduct an historical case study for a group of countries that had largely overcome the problem of Original Sin by...