While most Americans have long favored a balanced federal budget , not all do. This paper uses cross-sectional differences among respondents to two public opinion polls to try to discriminate among competing hypotheses about why Americans want the budget balanced. Logit models are fit to data...

It is by now widely recognized that investment decisions play a major role in the determination of individual age-earnings profiles. The purpose of this paper is to present a simple life-cycle model of investment in human capital in which leisure choices are explicitly incorporated. In so doing,...

Economists have an instinctively negative reaction to any government program that creates a "notch," that is, a discontinuity in a budget constraint. For example, welfare programs like public housing are structured so that a finite lump of benefits is lost all at once when a household's income...

This paper reports preliminary results from a large research project on business pricing which is currently underway. The idea is to use interviews with actual price setters to assess the validity of a dozen theories of price stickiness. The rather unorthodox (for economists) methodology is...

In dealing with the expectationists' arguments, I will divide them (somewhat artificially) into two groups. Arguments in the first group, which I call "present disaster" arguments, allege that econometric models err by understating the reaction of inflationary expectations. For example, it is...

Both economic theory and casual empirical observation of the U.S. economy suggest that spending propensities from temporary tax changes are smaller than those from permanent ones, but neither provides much guidance about the magnitude of this difference. This paper offers new empirical estimates...

This paper investigates the impacts of macroeconomic activity and policy on the poverty population. It is shown that both the poverty count and the income share of the lowest quintile of income recipients move significantly with the business cycle. The differential impact of inflation versus...

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication -- mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...