This paper reviews the literature on the recent benefit and funding landscape of state and local government employee pension plans. Many plans, with generous benefit structures and inadequate funding, are in troubled financial shape. The state of Connecticut pension plans are a good illustration...

There was a time when the Federal Reserve believed that honest money—i.e., a stable price level— was essential for achieving full employment. Today, retired Fed officials are recommending that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) target 3-percent inflation. They argue that a 3 percent...

We create a state-level measure of economic and police uncertainty during the 2007-2009 recession. Despite claims in the literature, the variation in this uncertainty measure matches the cross-sectional distribution of unemployment outcomes in this period. This relationship is robust to numerous...

This comment responds to Shaefer and Rivera (2018), a recent working paper that criticizes some of our published work on trends in income and consumption-based poverty measures in the United States.

In a prior article (Warshawsky and Marchand, 2017), a colleague and I put forward some broad proposals to improve the system of financing long-term services and supports (LTSS) for older Americans, to make it fairer, more sustainable, and more consistent with the value of self-reliance. In this...

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We...

A persistent issue for central banks in emerging market economies (EMEs) has been their difficulties in pursuing counter-cyclical monetary policies such as those adopted in advanced economies (AEs). The flexible inflation targeting pursued by most AE central banks entails tightening monetary...

Have workers stopped moving to the highest-density, highest-productivity places in the country because of a decline in the urban wage premium, or because the rent is too high?

We show that news stories contain information about economic linkages between firms and document that information diffuses slowly across linked stocks. Specifically, we identify linked stocks from co-mentions in news stories and find that linked stocks cross-predict one another's returns in the...

Meyer and Sullivan examine income inequality between 1963 and 2014 using the Current Population Survey and consumption inequality between 1960 and 2014 using the Consumer Expenditure Survey.