We analyze private fixed investment in the U.S. over the past 30 years. We show that investment is weak relative to measures of profitability and valuation – particularly Tobin's Q, and that this weakness starts in the early 2000's. There are two broad categories of explanations: theories that...

We use longitudinal individual wage and employment data in France and the United States to investigate the effect of changes in the real minimum wage rate on an individual?s employment status. We focus on workers employed at wages close enough to the minimum in a reference year as to be illegal...

The finance industry has grown. Financial markets have become more liquid. Information technology has improved. But have prices become more informative? Using stock and bond prices to forecast earnings, we find that the information content of market prices has not increased since 1960. The...

"Macroeconomists want to understand the effects of fiscal policy on interest rates, while financial economists look for the factors that drive the dynamics of the yield curve. To shed light on both issues, we present an empirical macro-finance model that combines a no-arbitrage affine term...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has been revolutionized. But have financial market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has undergone a revolution. But have market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from current...