This paper examines business cycles theoretically and empirically, with a quantitative study based on experience over the long run and in a cross section of countries. Several major questions in business cycle theory are explored. Theoretical concerns indicate that the properties of business...

Teens are risky drivers and often subject to extra restrictions. We examine the effects of an Australian intervention banning first-year drivers from carrying multiple passengers between 11:00pm and 4:59am, which had represented 3% of their accidents and 18% of their fatalities. Using daytime...

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across...

This paper examines some aspects of the tax treatment of U.S. multinational corporations. The emphasis is on problems of coordination of the different tax systems faced by the firms. The U.S. corporate income tax must take account of the fact that the firms' over- seas income is taxed by the...

This paper examines empirically the effect of unfunded pension obligations on corporate share prices and discusses the implications of these estimates for national saving, the decline of the stock market in recent years, and the rationality of corporate financial behavior. The analysis uses the...

This short note emphasizes and illustrates two basic points: (1) The private costs of unemployment, i.e., the costs borne by the unemployed themselves, vary substantially and are often extremely low. This low private cost is an important cause of the permanently high unemployment rate in the...

Given that application of the principle with full loss offset to all assets is impracticable, we may wish to consider provision of only a partial inflation-exclusion to assets for which it is feasible. The problem is examined in this paper by means of a simple model of anticipated inflation, in...

Many households hold little wealth, especially liquid wealth. In precautionary savings models, absent preference heterogeneity, these households should display not only higher marginal propensities to consume (MPCs), but also lower average propensities to consume (APCs) and higher future...