The real price of recreation goods and services has fallen dramatically over the last century. At the same time, hours per worker have also been on a steady decline. As recreation goods make leisure time more enjoyable, we investigate if the fall in their price has contributed to the decline in...

Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. We demonstrate that these differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, that...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that job polarization associated with skill-biased technological change accelerated during the Great Recession. We use a standard neoclassical growth framework to analyze how business cycle fluctuations interact with the long-run transition towards a...