We investigate the Expectations Hypotheses of the term structure of interest rates and of the foreign exchange market using vector autoregressive methods for the U.S. dollar, Deutsche mark, and British pound interest rates and exchange rates. In addition to standard Wald tests, we formulate...

The distribution of job satisfaction widened across cohorts of young men in the United States between 1978 and 1988, and between 1978 and 1996, in ways correlated with changing wage inequality. Satisfaction among workers in upper earnings quantiles rose relative to that of workers in lower...

This paper examines the operation of the gold standard and the performance of the Bank of England during the crisis of 1847. The key feature of that crisis has been its origin: it originated from a massive real shock rather than from monetary disorder. A harvest failure gave rise to commercial...

This paper studies individual and social motives in tax evasion. We build a simple dynamic model that incorporates these motives and their interaction. The social motives underpin the role of norms and is the source of the dynamics that we study. Our empirical analysis exploits the adoption in...

What was the return to education in the United States at mid-century? In 1940, the correlation between years of schooling and earnings was relatively low, less than it had been in 1915 or than it would be in later decades. In this paper, we estimate the causal return to schooling in 1940,...

Using a novel source of quasi-experimental variation in interest rates, we develop a new approach to estimating the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution (EIS). In the UK, the mortgage interest rate features discrete jumps - notches - at thresholds for the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. These...

This paper tests for bias in consumer lending decisions using administrative data from a high-cost lender in the United Kingdom. We motivate our analysis using a simple model of bias in lending, which predicts that profits should be identical for loan applicants from different groups at the...

We provide causal evidence that regulatory shocks associated with drug safety label changes lead to aggregate demand declines of 16.9 percent within two years of a relabeling event. After accounting for all plausible substitution patterns by physicians along with competitor actions, aggregate...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...

Previous research shows that many people seek financial advice from non-experts, and that peer interactions influence financial decisions. We investigate whether such influences are beneficial, harmful, or simply haphazard. In our laboratory experiment, face-to-face communication with a randomly...