This paper takes a new look at the long-run dynamics of inflation and unemployment in response to permanent changes in the growth rate of the money supply. We examine the Phillips curve from the perspective of what we call "frictional growth," i.e. the interaction between money growth and...

In many markets, firms make their products complex through add-on features, thus making them difficult to evaluate and compare. Does this product obfuscation lure buyers into buying overpriced products, and if so, why does competition not eliminate this practice? More generally, under which...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...

Are initial competitive advantages self-reinforcing, so that markets exhibit an endogenous tendency to be dominated by only a few firms? Although this question is of great economic importance, no systematic empirical study has yet addressed it. Therefore, we examine experimentally whether firms...

Previous experimental work provides encouraging support for some of the central assumptions underlying Hart and Moore (2008)'s theory of contractual reference points. However, existing studies ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and expost renegotiation....

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

We distinguish and assess three fundamental views of the labor market regarding the movements in unempoyment: (i) the frictionless equilibrium view; (ii) the chain reaction theory, or prolonged adjustment view; and (iii) the hysteresis view. While the frictionless view implies a clear...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, based on "frictional growth," describing the interplay between nominal frictions and money growth. When the money supply grows in the presence of price inertia (due to staggered wage contracts with time discounting), the...

This paper provides a critique of the "unemployment invariance hypothesis", according to which the behavior of the labor market ensures that the long-run unemployment rate is independent of the size of the capital stock, productivity and the labor force. Using Solow growth and endogenous growth...

It is commonly asserted that inflation is a jump variable in the New Keynesian Phillips curve, and thus wage-price inertia does not imply inflation inertia. We show that this "inflation flexibility proposition" is highly misleading, relying on the assumption that real variables are exogenous. In...