The paper examines Argentina’s economic expansion in the 1990s through the lens of a parsimonious neoclassical growth model. The main finding is that investment remained considerably weaker than what the model would have predicted. The resulting excessive “capital shallowing” could be...

Microeconomic studies keep reporting that the intertemporal substitution in consumption and the Frisch elasticity of aggregate labor supply have significantly lower values than macroeconomic models find consistent with the dynamics of aggregate variables. The paper argues that in the U.S. such...

The U.S. economy isn' t recovering from the deep Great Recession of 2008–2009 with the strength predicted by models that incorporate a variety of shocks and frictions in the basic analytical framework of the neoclassical growth model. It has been argued that the counterfactual predictions...

Argentina’s GDP increased 30% between 2002 and 2005, prompting optimistic assessments that the country had finally left behind its secular stagnation. However, this strong performance followed a sharp decline in economic activity and therefore could be the manifestation of a bounce-back effect...

This is the second of two articles examining the potential welfare gains or losses from a unilateral move toward free trade. Part 1 concluded that applied static models of international trade fail to produce eye-popping positive welfare effects. In Part 2, Carlos Zarazaga reviews available...

Central banks are always concerned with keeping long-run inflation expectations well anchored at some implicit or explicit low target inflation rate. To that end, they are constantly on the lookout for indicators that can gauge those expectations accurately. One such indicator frequently...

Fiscal policy is as significant as, and sometimes more important than, monetary policy in determining the price level and, therefore, the dynamics of inflation.

Multilateral trade agreements generally require protracted and complicated negotiations. An obvious alternative is unilateral trade liberalization. However, would this simpler route toward free trade improve a country's welfare? This article, the first in a series of two, addresses this question...

Argentina suffered a depression in the 1980s that was as severe as the Great Depression experienced in the United States and Germany in the interwar period. Our paper examines this depression from the perspective of growth theory, taking total factor productivity as exogenous. The predictions of...