Under Social Security privatization, workers would be allowed to divert some of the money that currently goes to Social Security into private accounts. This would expose them to market risk, that is, the risk of a substantial drop in equity prices or of a prolonged bear market. This could result...

The recent recovery continued a trend that started in the mid-1970s of a growing divergence between capital and labor incomes. This trend appears to be largely due to a shift in the balance of corporate governance. A growing concentration of financial assets among institutional investors was...

Prior research suggests that the Fed has consistently targeted unemployment rates, and, during the 1990s, stock prices. This paper uses a vector autoregression to test the importance of unemployment and the stock market in determining monetary policy, and to study the impact of monetary policy...

Progressive income taxation may result in a more equitable income distribution, higher revenues, less financial and economic volatility, and faster growth. The evidence shows a link with higher revenues and a more equitable income distribution but also with larger deficits. There is no link to...

Recent studies have conjectured that there may be a link between financial liberalization (FL) and financial instability in emerging economies. Most of these studies, however, do not investigate whether emerging economies are, in fact, becoming structurally more vulnerable to currency and...

The literature overwhelmingly supports the proposition that high-quality domestic institutions are a precondition for economic growth. Political freedoms have been shown to contribute to this institutional quality. A smaller literature suggests that the adoption and enforcement of core labor...