Media pundits and some politicians would have us believe that industrial production has been declining in the United States. Some would even say that “we don't make things anymore.” However, the statistics show a different picture. This paper examines the trade statistics for the United...

Am 3. November 2020 entscheidet sich, ob Donald Trump ein zweites Mal zum US-Präsidenten gewählt wird. Er hat seinen Wahlkampfslogan »Make America Great Again« rigoros verfolgt. Im Zuge dessen wurden diplomatische Konventionen gebrochen und jahrzehntealte internationale Verträge für...

This paper addresses the role of bilateral free trade agreements in U.S. trade policy and how their increased use has affected the multilateral trade system. It also considers the effects of bilateral trade deals on developing countries in terms of power bargaining and movement toward reciprocal...

Departing from Hotelling's assumption of fixed and known reserves, in this paper I develop an economic model of additions to proven reserves that explicitly incorporates the effects of expected resource price, cumulative reserves development, and technological progress on reserves additions. The...

In most instances, the dynamic response of monetary and other policies to shocks is infrequent and lumpy. The same holds for the microeconomic response of some of the most important economic variables, such as investment, labor demand, and prices. We show that the standard practice of estimating...

Hierarchical firms are enterprises with rigid internal job ladders. We examine the state enterprise as the prototypical hierarchical firm. In the state enterprise, promotion of employees through the internal hierarchy is determined by the workers’ allocation of time between rent seeking and...

In contrast to conventional model selection criteria, the Focused Information Criterion (FIC) allows for purpose-specific choice of models. This accommodates the idea that one kind of model might be highly appropriate for inferences on a particular parameter, but not for another. Ever since its...

The paper argues that, from a dynamic efficiency perspective, intersections of factor price frontiers are irrelevant to the choice of techniques. Because every change in technique involves a temporary loss or gain in both profit and per capita consumption within the transition period, its...

This paper studies the impact of financialization on unemployment in the U.S. We estimate a dynamic multi-equation macro labor model including labor demand, labor supply, wage-setting and capital accumulation equations. Financialization appears as a key determinant of capital accumulation which,...