Macroeconomics would not be what it is today without Edmund Phelps. This book assembles the field's leading figures to highlight the continuing influence of his ideas from the past four decades. Addressing the most important current debates in macroeconomic theory, it focuses on the rates at...

This paper reports the results of a new test of the Leontief-Trefler hypothesis that factor-augmenting international productivity differences explain most of the cross-country variation in factor prices. Our sample consists of four cross-sections of 16, 31, 51 and 50 countries for 1970, 1975,...

Over 60% of US households with credit cards are currently borrowing -- i.e., paying interest -- on those cards. We attempt to reconcile the high rate of credit card borrowing with observed levels of life cycle wealth accumulation. We simulate a lifecycle model with five properties that create...

Intertemporal preferences are difficult to measure. We estimate time preferences using a structural buffer stock consumption model and the Method of Simulated Moments. The model includes stochastic labor income, liquidity constraints, child and adult dependents, liquid and illiquid assets,...

This paper estimates the impact of private education on the academic achievement of low-income students in Chile. To deal with selection bias, we use propensity score matching to compare the test scores of reduced-fee paying, low-income students in fee-charging private voucher schools to those...