Using a VAR model of the American economy from 1984 to 2003, we find that, contrary to official claims, the Federal Reserve does not target inflation or react to "inflation signals." Rather, the Fed reacts to the very "real" signal sent by unemployment, in a way that suggests that a baseless...

This paper presents a review of the literature on the economics of shared societies. As defined by the Club de Madrid, shared societies are societies in which people hold an equal capacity to participate in and benefit from economic, political, and social opportunities regardless of race,...

The deficiencies of the Deininger and Squire data set on household income inequality are well known to include sparse coverage, problematic measurements, and the combination of diverse data types into a single data set. Yet many studies have relied on this data due to the lack of available...

Inequality is a charged topic. Measures of income inequality rose in the USA in the 1990s to levels not seen since 1929 and gave rise to a suspicion, not for the first time, of a link between radical inequality and financial instability with a resulting crisis under capitalism. Professional...

This paper reconsiders the problem of unemployment in Europe at multiple geographic levels and through time from 1984 to 2000. We employ a panel structure that permits us to separate regional, national and continental influences on Europeanunemployment. Important local effects include the...