This paper develops a partial equilibrium model to account for stylized facts about the behavior of oligarchs, politically and economically strong conglomerates in transition and developing countries. The model predicts that oligarchs are more likely than other owners to invest in productivity...

This paper integrates imposing a factor structure on residuals in vector autoregressions (VARs) into structural VAR analysis. Identification, estimation and testing procedures are discussed. The paper applies this approach to the well-known problem of studying the effects of monetary policy in...

We analyze lifetime earnings histories of white males during 1960-2010 and categorize the labor force status of every worker as either working full-time, partially retired or fully retired. We find that the fraction of partially retired workers has risen dramatically (from virtually zero to 15...

Economists’ standard model assumes that improvements in total factor productivity (TFP) raise the marginal product of labor for all workers evenly. This paper uses an earnings dynamics regression model to study whether, in practice, older workers benefit less from TFP growth than younger...

Using a daily survey of U.S. households, we study how the Federal Reserve’s announcement of its new strategy of average inflation targeting affected households’ expectations. Starting with the day of the announcement, there is a very small uptick in the minority of households reporting that...

New surveys provide a wealth of information on how economic agents form their expectations and how those expectations shape their decisions. We review recent evidence on how changes in macroeconomic expectations, particularly inflation expectations, affect households’ and firms’ actions. We...

We study how firms’ expectations and actions are affected by both aggregate and industry-specific conditions using a survey of French manufacturing firms. We document two novel features. First, the adjustment of firms’ expectations is more rapid after industry-specific shocks than aggregate...

Using a new survey of firms' inflation expectations in France, we provide novel evidence about the measurement and formation of inflation expectations on the part of firms. First, French firms report inflation expectations with a smaller, but still positive, bias than households and display less...

As the pandemic spread across the U.S., disagreement among U.S. households about inflation expectations surged along with the mean perceived and expected level of inflation. Simultaneously, the inflation experienced by households became more dispersed. Using matched micro data on spending of...

Households’ and firms’ subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households’ and firms’...