Along with house rents, wages have frequently been described as the "stickiest" prices in the economy, rarely adjusted more than once a year. Because of this stickiness (which arises from the transactions costs involved in changing wages), a distinction exists between the adjustment of wages and...

Wage and price controls have a long and somewhat disreputable history, presumably because of their frequent use in many countries as short run substitutes for measure~ with more lasting effects on the inflation rate. But, in 1985 and 1986, Argentina, Brazil, and Israel used extensive wage-price...

We characterize the macroeconomic performance of a set of industrialized economies in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and of the last decade, focusing on the differences across episodes. We examine four different hypotheses for the mild effects on inflation and economic...

This paper empirically analyzes the Expectations Hypothesis (EH) in inflation-indexed (or real) bonds and in nominal bonds in the US and in the UK. We strongly reject the EH in inflation-indexed bonds, and also confirm and update the existing evidence rejecting the EH in nominal bonds. This...

In Fall 2009, officials from Chicago Public Schools changed their assignment mechanism for coveted spots at selective college preparatory high schools midstream. After asking about 14,000 applicants to submit their preferences for schools under one mechanism, the district asked them re-submit...

Inflation targeting is a monetary-policy strategy that is characterized by an announced numerical inflation target, an implementation of monetary policy that gives a major role to an inflation forecast and has been called forecast targeting, and a high degree of transparency and accountability....

This paper, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance co-sponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate...

Recent tests using long data series find evidence in favor of long-run PPP (by rejecting either the null hypothesis of unit roots in real exchange rates or the null of no cointegration between nominal exchange rates and relative prices.) These tests may have reached the wrong conclusion. Monte...

Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to...

We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...