There is much debate about the usefulness of the neoclassical growth model for assessing the macroeconomic impact of fiscal shocks. We test the theory using data from World War II, which is by far the largest fiscal shock in the history of the United States. We take observed changes in fiscal...

As part of compensation, municipal employees typically receive promises of future benefits. Motivated by the recent bankruptcy of Detroit, we develop a model of the equilibrium size of a city and use it to analyze how pay-with-promises schemes interact with city growth. The paper examines the...

Pay-with-promises compensation plans accumulate liability for future employee benefits, such as retiree health insurance. A simple economic model demonstrates that such plans can exacerbate fiscal crises faced by cities that experience external economic shocks, such as the departure of a major...

The decline of the heavy manufacturing industry in the American “Rust Belt” is often thought to have begun in the late 1970s, when the United States suffered a significant recession. But theory suggests, and data support, that the Rust Belt’s decline started in the 1950s when the...

Many economists have worried about changes in the demand for money, since money demand shocks can affect output variability and have implications for monetary policy. This paper studies the theoretical implications of changes in money demand for the nonneutrality of money in the limited...

Unit root tests against trend break alternatives are based on the premise that the dating of the trend breaks coincides with major economic events with permanent effects on economic activity, such as wars and depressions. Standard economic theory, however, suggests that these events have large...

We propose a constructive, multivariate framework for assessing agreement between (generally misspecified) dynamic equilibrium models and data, a framework which enables a complete second-order comparison of the dynamic properties of models and data. We use bootstrap algorithms to evaluate the...

Between 1929 and 1933, real output per adult fell over 30 percent and total factor productivity fell 18 percent. This productivity decrease is much larger than expected from just extrapolating the productivity decrease that typically occurs during recessions. This paper evaluates what factors...