Are the U.S. textile and apparel industries examples of creative destruction or are they just plain destructing? We investigate this question using both aggregate industry-level data and plant-level data from the U.S. Census' LRD. We find that while the aggregate-level evidence is consistent...

Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in the first place depends on equilibrium tax policies. If a society believes that individual effort...

Monetary policies in the U.S., Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom over the period 1973-1986 are compared and evaluated, with the aim of drawing lessons for monetary policy from the recent historical record. All four countries shifted during this period to money targeting, though with...

Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these...

This paper studies the dynamic behavior of changes in productivity, wages, and prices. Results are based on a new data set that allows a consistent analysis of the aggregate economy, the manufacturing sector, and the nonmanufacturing sector. Results are presented for the U. S., Japan, and an...

Casual observation indicates that in recent years real interest rates in the United States appear to have risen sharply and have remained high relative to historical standards. Many observers have claimed that these high real rates have been transmitted abroad and have lead to high real rates in...

We compute new estimates for Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in the United States and in five European countries. Departing from standard methods, we account for positive profits and use firm surveys to proxy for unobserved changes in factor utilization. These novelties have a major...

This paper provides a new heterogeneous firm model for trade where firms differ in their productivity and experience different market demand shocks. The model incorporates variations in trade policy, trade preferences, and the rules of origin needed to obtain them, to reflect real world...

Hirschman's (1970) seminal thesis that enabling worker “voice” prevents exit from the employment relationship has played a foundational role in labor economics. We provide the first experimental test of this hypothesis in a real-world setting via a randomized controlled trial in Indian...

Which managerial skills, traits, and practices matter most for productivity? How does the observability of these features affect how appropriately they are priced into wages? Combining two years of daily, line-level production data from a large Indian garment firm with rich survey data on line...