The evolution of debt-income ratios over time depends on income growth, inflation, and interest rates, independent of any changes in borrowing. We examine the effect of these "Fisher dynamics" on household debt-income ratios in the United States over the period 1929–2011. Adapting a standard...

Summary Inequality between identity groups has long been thought of as an important contributor to social unrest and violence as well as being important in assessing the justice of societies. Yet, the measurement of the ways in which such groups differ and are unequal remains underdeveloped....

In this paper, we examine the labor market during the Great Recession and find some startling features underlying the stagnation and decline of 2007-10. The population in the labor force has stagnated while the population that is out of the labor force has grown sharply. For the first time since...

History shows that austerity does not work when economies are weakening. Some influential studies argue otherwise. These two writers show that the leading such study does not prove the point. If anything, the data show the very opposite. Do not try to cut deficits in recession or weak recovery.

We examine patterns of indebtedness in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, focusing on the period surrounding the housing bubble and its aftermath (i.e. 1999-2009). Leverage increased most quickly among lower income households during this period. We findnd that leverage grew faster for...

This study uses survey data from India to examine the top percentile of the wealth distribution in India. Using nationally representative samples from two years, 1991 and 2002, a power law tail is found with a Pareto exponent ranging between 1.8 and 2.4. The tail is examined for three specific...

We introduce the Global Consumption and Income Project (GCIP), which is developing two separate datasets (The Global Consumption Dataset (GCD) and The Global Income Dataset (GID)) containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries,...

We introduce two separate datasets.the Global Consumption Dataset and the Global Income Dataset.containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version of the dataset presents estimates in...

This book, written by an international team of economists, develops concrete, country specific alternatives to inflation targeting, the dominant policy framework of central bank policy that focuses on keeping inflation in the low single digits to the virtual exclusion of other key goals such as...

We introduce two separate datasets (The Global Consumption Dataset (GCD) and The Global Income Dataset (GID)) containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version of the dataset presents...