This paper examines the Faustian dynamics of policy and power. We posit a general class of dynamic games in which current policies affect the future distribution of political power, resulting in the following "Faustian trade off": if the current ruler chooses his preferred policy, he then...

A common problem in dynamic economic theory is to determine when an increase in a parameter and/or an initial condition increases the future dynamics of a theoretical economy. This paper provides conditions that are necessary and sufficient for making statements of this type. The result is...

In recent years, employees have been shouldering an increasing share of the costs of traditional employer-provided health insurance. At the same time, more and more employers have been allowing employees to pay their out-of-pocket health care costs using pre-tax earnings, through tax-subsidized...

This paper describes a method for calculating daily real-time estimates of the current state of the U.S. economy. The estimates are computed from data on scheduled U.S. macroeconomic announcements using an econometric model that allows for variable reporting lags, temporal aggregation, and other...

This paper compares the true, ex-ante forecasting performance of a micro-based model against both a standard macro model and a random walk. In contrast to existing literature, which is focused on longer horizon forecasting, we examine forecasting over horizons from one day to one month (the...

This paper tests whether macroeconomic news is transmitted to exchange rates via the transactions process and if so, what share occurs via transactions versus the traditional direct channel. We identify the link between order flow and macro news using a heteroskedasticity-based approach, a la...

We use the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys from 1992-93 and 1997-98 to examine inequality between urban and rural areas in Vietnam. Real per capita household consumption expenditure (RPCE) is our measure of well being. We apply a quantile regression decomposition technique to analyze the...

We develop a model of undescribable events. Examples of events that are well understood by economic agents but are prohibitively difficult to describe in advance abound in real-life. This notion has also pervaded a substantial amount of economic literature. We put forth a model of such events...

By now the observation that some pollutants appear to increase and then decrease with economic development has become a widely accepted stylized fact. This paper argues that the fundamental insight of the empirical literature is merely that pollution does not necessarily increase with economic...

A recent theoretical literature has linked reductions in income inequality to reductions in child labor in countries that are relatively well-off, but has not explored how income distribution affects child labor in very poor countries. We show that while in higher-productivity countries with...