In an earlier paper (Blinder and Morgan, 2005), we created an experimental apparatus in which Princeton University students acted as ersatz central bankers, making monetary policy decisions both as individuals and in groups. In this study, we manipulate the size and leadership structure of...

Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true there is no significant difference in...

Why would the US threaten punitive tariffs on luxury autos to implement a market share target in auto parts? We show that by making threats to a linked market, a market share may be implemented with fairly weak informa- tional and administrative requirements. Moreover, such policies can be both...

The U.S. economy has grown faster--and scored higher on many other macroeconomic metrics--when the President of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican. For many measures, including real GDP growth (on which we concentrate), the performance gap is both large and statistically...

A small interview survey was undertaken to see how actual wage-setters would react to the central. ideas of several economic theories of wage stickiness. Wage cuts were surprisingly prevalent in recent years, despite the booming economy. The strongest finding was that managers believe that...

This paper develops a simple but important point which is often overlooked: It is quite possible that the best policy for a rational, optimizing agent is to do nothing for long periods of time--even if new, relevant information becomes available. We illustrate this point using the market for...

When empirical stock-adjustment models of manufacturers' inventories of finished goods are estimated, there appear to be two local minima in the sum of squared residuals functions. At one local minimum, the estimated adjustment speed is typically quite high; at the other, it is typically quite...

U.S. inflation data exhibit two notable spikes into the double-digit range in 1973-1974 and again in 1978-1980. The well-known "supply-shock" explanation attributes both spikes to large food and energy shocks plus, in the case of 1973-1974, the removal of price controls. Yet critics of this...

This paper examines issues in the current debate over coordination between fiscal and monetary policies. Section I1 uses the traditional targets-instruments approach to assess the potential gains from greater coordination. Since greater coordination is often equated with looser money and tighter...

It has been known for a long time that inventory fluctuations are of great importance in business cycles. But inventory fluctuations are fundamentally a short-period phenomenon. Consequently, annual data may shed relatively little light on the nature of inventory fluctuations; most of the...