In most western societies, marital fertility began to decline in the nineteenth century. But in Ireland, fertility in marriage remained stubbornly high into the twentieth century. Explanations of Ireland's late entry to the fertility transition focus on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church...

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...

In this paper we estimate an encompassing Macro-Finance model allowing for time variation in the equilibrium real rate, mispricing and learning dynamics. The encompassing model specification incorporates (i) a small-scale (semi-) structural New-Keynesian model, (ii) flexible price of risk...

Research on "trust" now forms a prominent part of the research agenda in history and the social sciences. Although this research has generated useful insights, the idea of trust has been used so widely and loosely that it risks creating more confusion than clarity. This essay argues that to the...

We explore the extent to which the huge race gap in wealth can be explained with properly constructed income and demographic variables. In some instances we explain the entire wealth gap with income and demographics provided that we estimate the wealth model on a sample of whites. However, we...

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is widely used to identify and quantify the separate contributions of group differences in measurable characteristics, such as education, experience, marital status, and geographical differences to racial and gender gaps in outcomes. The technique...

Height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status. Height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown. Height is determined by genetic make up and realized in...

Using a Bayesian likelihood approach, we estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for the US economy using seven macro-economic time series. The model incorporates many types of real and nominal frictions and seven types of structural shocks. We show that this model is able to...

This article deals with income advantages derived from owner occupied housing (Imputed Rent, IR) and their impact on the personal income distribution. Following a brief description of different methods with which to calculate IR in household surveys, we conduct a cross-national comparative study...

We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the...