Wage and price controls have a long and somewhat disreputable history, presumably because of their frequent use in many countries as short run substitutes for measure~ with more lasting effects on the inflation rate. But, in 1985 and 1986, Argentina, Brazil, and Israel used extensive wage-price...

Disappointing recent growth rates, the emergence of structurally unfavorable income and employment conditions, and important institutional changes in the international trading environment have caused policy officials in the advanced industrial nations to reconsider the proper mix of reactive...

Along with house rents, wages have frequently been described as the "stickiest" prices in the economy, rarely adjusted more than once a year. Because of this stickiness (which arises from the transactions costs involved in changing wages), a distinction exists between the adjustment of wages and...

In a rare example of an explicit national goal for income distribution besides reducing poverty, China's leadership has recently committed to expanding the middle-income share--moving to a less polarized "olive-shaped" distribution. Recognizing the potential trade-offs, the paper asks whether...

Education and income are strong predictors of health and longevity. In the last 20 years many efforts have been made to understand if these relationships are causal and what the possible role of policy should be as a result. The evidence from various studies is ambiguous: the effects of...

We characterize the macroeconomic performance of a set of industrialized economies in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and of the last decade, focusing on the differences across episodes. We examine four different hypotheses for the mild effects on inflation and economic...

In this paper, we investigate whether or not recent state and federal changes in welfare policy -- the imposition of time-limited benefits, the use of financial sanctions for non-compliance, and the setting of strict work eligibility rules -- affect the migration of low-educated unmarried women....

European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps because of trade shocks), the social costs of...

This paper examines the impact of Clinton era social policy changes on the poor. It explores shifts in incentives, behavior, and incomes and discusses the role Clinton did or did not play in influencing the policy mix and the nature of the political debate surrounding poverty. Policy changes...

This paper examines two questions: how will the labor force change over the next 20 years, and can social policy significantly alter its size and shape. In the last twenty years, the overall labor force grew by 35 percent and the so-called prime age workforce those aged 25-54 grew by a...