Innovations to measures of consumer confidence convey incremental information about economic activity far into the future. Comparing the shapes of impulse responses to confidence innovations in the data with the predictions of a calibrated New Keynesian model, we find little evidence of a strong...

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...

We present a dictator game experiment where the recipients are local charities that serve the poor. Donors consist of approximately 1000 participants from a nationally representative respondent panel that is maintained by a private survey research firm, Knowledge Networks. We randomly manipulate...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by...

Employing the neutral Kindleberger definition of a bubble as "an upward price movement over an extended range that then implodes", this paper explores the causes of the "Japanese Bubble" of 1985 to 1990 without precluding the possibility that the bubble was due to perceptions of fundamentals....

Observers have argued about whether highly-educated women are opting out of their careers and for families. If so, it is natural to expect fertility to increase and, insofar as children are associated with lower employment, further declines in employment. This paper provides a comprehensive...

Different economies at different times use different institutional arrangements to constrain the people entrusted with allocating the economy's capital and other resources. Comparative financial histories show these corporate governance regimes to be largely stable through time, but capable of...

The rate of increase of longevity has varied considerably across U.S. states since 1991. This paper examines the effect of the quality of medical care, behavioral risk factors (obesity, smoking, and AIDS incidence), and other variables (education, income, and health insurance coverage) on life...

In much economic analysis it is a convenient fiction to suppose that changes over time in wages and employment are determined by shifts in supply or demand within a more or less competitive market framework Indeed, this framework has been effectively deployed to understand many episodes in...