One of the central questions in macroeconomics for many years has been whether government policy can affect private saving rates, and if so to what extent and through what channels. The question has remained controversial because, as with other macroeconomic questions, experiments to check...

The economic convergence of American regions has greatly slowed, and rates of long-term non-employment have even been diverging. Simultaneously, the rate of non-employment for working age men has nearly tripled over the last 50 years, generating a terrible social problem that is...

The obvious lesson from the Great Financial Crisis is that the financial system matters and financial crises will probably happen again. The second, more general, lesson is that the economy is often not self-stabilizing. These two lessons, together with an environment where neutral interest...

Since 1973 median compensation has diverged starkly from average labor productivity. Since 2000, average compensation has also begun to diverge from labor productivity. These divergences lead to the question: to what extent does productivity growth translate into compensation growth for typical...

We investigate the bank lending channel of negative nominal policy rates from an empirical and theoretical perspective. We find that retail household deposit rates are subject to a lower bound (DLB). Empirically, once the DLB is met, the pass-through to lending rates and credit volumes is...

This paper re-examines the relationship between population aging and economic growth. We confirm previous research such as Cutler, Poterba, Sheiner, and Summers (1990) and Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) that show positive correlation between measures of population aging and per-capita output...

We explore two issues triggered by the crisis. First, in most advanced countries, output remains far below the pre-recession trend, suggesting hysteresis. Second, while inflation has decreased, it has decreased less than anticipated, suggesting a breakdown of the relation between inflation and...

The global financial crisis has permanently lowered the path of GDP in all advanced economies. At the same time, and in response to rising government debt levels, many of these countries have been engaging in fiscal consolidations that have had a negative impact on growth rates. We empirically...

Conditions of secular stagnation - low interest rates, below target inflation, and sluggish output growth - characterize much of the global economy. We consider an overlapping generations, open economy model of secular stagnation, and examine the effect of capital flows on the transmission of...

Conditions of secular stagnation - low interest rates, below target inflation, and sluggish output growth – now characterize much of the global economy. We consider a simple two-country textbook model to examine how capital markets transmit secular stagnation and to study policy externalities...