The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis monthly journal of record presents summary estimates and analyses of U.S. economic activity. It includes articles about the national, regional, and international economic accounts and related topics. It also presents the latest estimates of the national...

KIDS COUNT is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the U.S. Ten key measures comprise an index of child well-being used to rank states and supplemental data on education, health, and economic conditions for each state. Data from the 2003 KIDS COUNT Data Book...

For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, Washington's preeminent think tank, have tracked the march of economic freedom around the world with the influential Index of Economic Freedom. Since 1995, the Index has brought Smith's theories about liberty, prosperity and...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...

[...]The task facing the Eurosystem is even morecomplex than that facing countries with stable monetaryregimes, where the measurement of the national andregional impact of policy has already proved to be extremelydifficult. The creation of the Eurosystem constitutes aregime shift in virtually...

In practice, central banks have been confronted with a trade-off between stabilising inflation and output when dealing with rising oil prices. This contrasts with the result in the standard New Keynesian model that ensuring complete price stability is the optimal thing to do, even when an oil...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...

[...]Like the other countries examined, the United Kingdomadopted inflation targets after a successful disinflation.Unlike these countries, however, the UnitedKingdom took this step in the aftermath of a foreignexchange rate crisis in order to restore a nominalanchor and to lock in past...

Nobuko Inagawa has written an excellent paper on the relevance of Japanese experiences for a successful integration of Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) into the world economy. Talking about the case of Japan is particularly interesting - and potentially controversial - compared...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar’s long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. Idescribe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, withdistinguished economists’ stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar’s goal is to show howeconomists work, but also...