This paper considers the role of policy in an AI-intensive economy (interpreting AI broadly). It emphasizes the speed of adoption of the technology for the impact on the job market and the implications for inequality across people and across places. It also discusses the challenges of enacting a...

Pay-as-you-go Social Security is typically characterized as a universal defined benefit pension program. Implicit in this characterization is a sense that the participant's investment in future benefits is somehow guaranteed, or safe from risk. This study develops the concept of "political risk"...

While most contemporary historians agree that the use of debt peonage as a coercive labor contract in Mexico was not widespread, scholars still concur that it was important and pervasive in Yucatan state during the henequen boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The henequen boom...

The current historical consensus on the economic causes of the inexorable Nazi electoral success between 1930 and 1933 suggests this was largely related to the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression (high unemployment and financial instability). However, these factors cannot fully account...

Moderating spillovers from the advanced economies during the Great Moderation, the global information technology revolution, the influx of skilled immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the gradual buildup of robust and well-regulated financial institutions over decades after the...

We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing anti-system parties in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. We confirm the existence of a link between political extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth or contraction of the economy. What mattered...

A growing literature identifies associations between subjective and biometric indicators of wellbeing. These associations, together with the ability of subjective wellbeing (SWB) metrics to predict health and behavioral outcomes, have spawned increasing interest in SWB as an important concept in...

Against a background of projections of sharply increasing elderly dependency rates, workers in the major industrial economies are apprehensive that their social security benefit entitlements will be cut before or after they retire, leaving them with inadequate retirement income. This paper looks...

This paper presents a framework for how to incorporate prior sources of information into the design of a sequential experiment. These sources can include previous experiments, expert opinions, or the experimenter's own introspection. We formalize this problem using a multi-prior Bayesian...