Germany entered the euro with a current account deficit but over the entire past decade has run large and persistent current account surpluses. Besides joining the common currency, the increase of Germany’s current account since the late 1990s has been accompanied by strong shifts in the...

Economic theory frequently assumes constant factor shares and often treats the topic as secondary. We will show that this is a mistake by deriving the first high-frequency measure of the US labor share for the whole economy. We find that the labor share has held remarkably steady indeed, but...

There is growing concern in Europe over the impact of globalization on high and evenly shared living standards. These concerns have often surfaced in response to falling labor income shares in aggregate national income data. However, these data may tell little about the underlying distribution...

The paper examines the distributional consequences of financial crises based on the lessons of the past crises experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and Turkey. It identifies the possible channels through which crises may affect functional and personal distribution of income. It...

This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth...