We study the determination of Irish inflation between 1926 and 2012. The difference between unemployment and the NAIRU is a significant determinant of inflation in a simple backward-looking Phillips Curve that incorporates import prices. While there is a break in 1979-80, when the link to...

We argue that firms’ balance sheets were instrumental in the propagation of shocks during the Great Recession. Using establishment-level data, we show that firms that tightened their debt capacity in the run-up (“high-leverage firms”) exhibit a significantly larger decline in employment in...

There is relatively little research on peer effects in teenage motherhood despite the fact that peer effects, and in particular social interaction within the family, is likely to be important. We estimate the impact of an elder sister’s teenage fertility on the teenage childbearing of their...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers’ reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to...

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled-to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework,...

Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in...

We investigate the long term determinants of political and economic outcomes over a new data set composed of Mississippi counties. We analyze the effect of disfranchisement on voting registration at the end of the nineteenth century (1896-9), as well as the impact of voting registration on...

We study the relationship between education and fertility, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in Europe as source of exogenous variation in education. Using data from 8 European countries, we assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological kids and the incidence of...

This paper develops a theory characterizing the effects of fiscal policy on unemployment over the business cycle. The theory is based on a model of equilibrium unemployment in which jobs are rationed in recessions. Fiscal policy in the form of government spending on public-sector jobs reduces...

This paper argues that the stock market crash of 2008, triggered by a collapse in house prices, caused the Great Recession. The paper has three parts. First, it provides evidence of a high correlation between the value of the stock market and the unemployment rate in U.S. data since 1929....