We study the impact of Federal alcohol Prohibition in 1919 on workers in the alcohol industry and their families using newly linked census records that allow us to follow spouses, sons and daughters. Immediately after Prohibition, men previously working in alcohol-related industries were less...

In the aftermath of the 1997-98 Asian crises, many emerging markets self-insured by accumulating international reserves (i.e., non-contingent assets) in excess of what many models predicted, while relying relatively little on state-contingent assets. This apparent over-reliance on self-insurance...

This paper uses barcode-level price data for 16 advanced and emerging market countries over the period 2005-2022 to investigate the role of individual firms and product categories in aggregate inflation. We decompose inflation into the component due to macroeconomic shocks and the granular...

This paper examines how liquidity shocks caused by currency shortages impact exports. We explore this in the context of India's 2016 currency demonetization, a sudden and unexpected policy announcement by the government that large-denomination currency notes--comprising 86% of the country's...

This article applies simple methods from computational linguistics to analyze unstructured corporate texts for economic surveillance. We apply text-as-data approaches to earnings conference call transcripts, patent texts, and job postings to uncover unique insights into how markets and firms...

We study the propagation of nominal shocks in a dispersed information economy where firms learn from and respond to information generated by their activities in product and factor markets. We prove the existence of a "Hayekian benchmark", defined by conditions under which imperfect information...

Much of the empirical literature on the natural rate of interest has focused on estimating its path. This paper addresses the question of how exogenous movements in the natural rate of interest affect aggregate activity and inflation in the short and long runs. To this end it proposes a...

How much do consumption patterns matter for the impact of international trade on inequality? In neoclassical trade models, the effects of trade shocks on consumers' purchasing power are governed by the shares of imports in consumer expenditures, under no parametric assumptions on preferences and...

We examine the effects of active international reserve management (IRM) conducted by central banks of emerging market economies (EMEs) on firm investment in the presence of global financial shocks. Using firm level data from 46 EMEs from 2000 to 2018, we document four findings. First, active IRM...