We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of the fasting period due to the rotating Islamic calendar. We report two key, quantitatively...

During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the amount of the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0, a range...

Thirty years ago, Nanak Kakwani provided elegant nonparametric formulae for the point elasticities of measures of poverty with respect to changes in the mean of the distribution of income, thus analytically linking the poverty measures to key macroeconomic aggregates. Numerous insights are found...

Not all of that extra output will remain in the United States. If the trade deficit is reduced by three percent of GDP, the rise in exports and decline in imports will reduce output available for U.S. consumption and investment by about 0.3 percent a year

The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth, both in common practice and in the law, rather than alternative measures reflecting a person's stage in the lifecycle distorts important behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency ratios. Two alternative...

This paper uses the neoclassical growth model to examine the extent to which a tax cut pays for itself through higher economic growth. The model yields simple expressions for the steady-state feedback effect of a tax cut. The feedback is surprisingly large: for standard parameter values, half of...

This paper is concerned with the growth of individual earnings over time. Four aspects of time are distinguished: experience, age, vintage and calendar year. The first section of the paper provides a brief outline of a theory of planned growth in earnings. The second and main section of the...

During the past decade, much has been said about the role that on-the-job training plays in augmenting one's stock of human capital. Up to this point, little has been done to distinguish the effect of on-the-job training from that of aging on the increase in human wealth. The reason rests...

This paper studies the evolution of income concentration in Japan from 1886 to 2002 by constructing long-run series of top income shares and top wage income shares, using income tax statistics. We find that (1) income concentration was extremely high throughout the pre-WWII period during which...