On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon imposed the first and only peacetime wage and price controls in U.S. history. The Nixon tapes, personal tape recordings made during the presidency of Richard Nixon, are now available to the public and provide a unique body of evidence to investigate the...

We analyze the impact of market share on advertising and pricing decisions by firms that sell to loyal, non-shopping customers and can advertise to shoppers through an information intermediary or "gatekeeper." In equilibrium the firm with the smaller loyal market advertises more aggressively but...

We investigate changes in the pricing policies of exporters, including changes in the exchange rate pass-through elasticity, and changes in the elasticities of variables that affect the firm’s markup. We set up a theoretical model of optimal export pricing in order to illustrate how changes in...

Card and Krueger's analysis of the impact of the 1992 increase in the NJ state minimum wage is very well known and still controversial. Interestingly, the original NJ-PA natural experiment was followed by another one involving the same two states, an experiment that has not yet been noted or...

Misclassification of the dependent variable in binary choice models can result in inconsistency of the parameter estimates. I estimate probit models that treat misclassification probabilities as estimable parameters for three labor market outcomes: formal sector employment, pension contribution...

This paper simulates the use of transfers to households plus central-bank open-market purchases to generate a recovery of a low-interest-rate economy from a negative demand shock. Transfers to households are automatically triggered in recession; the prescribed anti-recession transfer ratio is...

Some economic models like the cash-in-advance model of money or overlapping generations model have the property that the dynamics are ill-defined going forward in time, but well-defined going backward in time. In such instances, what does it mean for an ill-defined dynamical system to be...

This paper examines the dynamic effects of government outlays on economic growth and the unemployment rate in the context of vector autoregression. We utilize data from 20 OECD countries over three recent decades. Our main conclusions are: (1) positive shocks to government outlays will slow down...

The Bernanke-Blinder credit-view model is expanded to encompass a small, open economy with fixed exchange rates. In contrast to conventional wisdom and traditional models, monetary policy is resurrected as a stabilization tool. Further, various financial sector shocks are shown to have real...

This study examines the effects of taxes on the real exchange rate through their marginal impacts on economic activity. We develop a model that shows that an increase in the capital interest tax rate leads to real domestic currency depreciation while an increase in wage or consumption tax rates...