This paper investigates the potential reasons for the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008-09. Unemployment rates did not change substantially in Germany, increased and...

This paper assesses the impacts of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) on trade in both goods and services among members using a gravity model applied to a panel dataset covering 20 OECD countries over the period 1996-2008 for trade in goods and 1999-2008 for trade in services. The...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to flexibly infer border barriers are often missing for services, we derive a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical...

Between 2007 and 2009, government expenditures increased rapidly across the OECD countries. While economic research on the impact of government purchases has flourished, in the data, about three quarters of the increase in expenditures in the United States (and more in other countries) was in...

This paper estimates the long-term effects of the global recession of 2008-2009 on output in 23 countries. I measure these effects by comparing current estimates of potential output from the OECD and IMF to the path that potential was following in 2007, according to estimates at the time. The...

In order to better capture the close relationship between firms' cross-border trading activities and the sales and purchasing activities of their foreign affiliates, this paper proposes supplementary accounting formats that classify cross-border and foreign affiliate activities on an ownership...

Direct investment in foreign countries by U.S. goods industries represents a response to differences in labor costs to a much greater extent than the more rapidly growing investment by service industries. The latter seem to be less able to allocate different types of production to different...

Previous studies of the U.S. Great Depression find that increased taxation contributed little to either the dramatic downturn or the slow recovery. These studies include only one type of capital taxation: a business profits tax. The contribution is much greater when the analysis includes other...

The paper provides a survey of fiscal and monetary policies during the 1930s under the Hoover and Roosevelt Administrations and how they influenced the policies during the recent Great Recession. The discussion of the causal impacts of monetary policy focuses on papers written in the last decade...