Generous unemployment benefits lie at the heart of the conventional explanation for persistent high unemployment. The micro evidence suggests modest effects of changes in generosity, but there are reasons to doubt that the impacts on national unemployment rates are consequential. The authors...

The causes of the present crisis are largely to be found in the unregulated development of new financial products and in the over-expansion of the financial sector, in particular the shadow banking sector, which emerged precisely to avoid regulation. These changes led to lower risk perception,...

The recent revision of the World Bank’s global poverty estimates based on a new $1.25 (2005 PPP) poverty line underlines their unreliability and lack of meaningfulness. It is very difficult to justify various aspects of the Bank’s approach. In the short term, less weight should be given to...

A new data set shows the extensive use of sharecropping in modern U.S. agriculture particularly in wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, and cotton. For these five crops, I investigate the importance of risk and three types of incentive problems that are commonly regarded to 'cause' sharecropping. A...