The relationships between the economic fluctuations of the US and China, the largest developed and developing countries respectively, are very important not only to both countries but also to the world economy. This paper applies a two-country correlated unobserved components model to explore...

In this article, I focus on the potential trade spillovers of Chinese policies to maintain employment. Chinese leaders are determined to maintain employment and have long ignored employment laws that could empower workers. But in 2007, China reformed its labor laws and allowed wide public...

This paper evaluates the potential impact of forecast errors on policy. We jointly evaluate the Federal Reserve staff forecasts of U.S. real output growth and the inflation rate in the context of the Taylor (1993) monetary policy rule. Our simple methodology generates “policy forecast...

We decompose core CPI and the food and energy CPI measures into permanent and transitory components using a correlated unobserved components model, to examine the behavior of core CPI when subject to shocks and to examine the claim that core CPI captures the persistent part of headline CPI. We...

In this paper we present an evaluation of forecasts of a vector of variables of the German economy made by different institutions. Our method permits one to evaluate the forecasts for each year and then if one is interested to combine the years. We use our method to determine an overall winner...

How do economic crisis a§ect national-level policy choices? Are technocratic advisors more likely to enter government during periods of severe economic volatility? If so, how does such governance a§ect economic policymaking and social responsiveness? In this paper, I evaluate the role of...

How do domestic Örms respond to the threat of foreign competition? This paper quantifies the threat of competition from foreign multinational firms by exploring investment news that appear in over 35,000 newspapers, trade presses, magazines, newswires, and other forms of media in 200 countries....

As the major players in globalization, firms often operate in states where human rights may not be respected. Without direct intent, firms may be complicit in human rights violations. In 2008, John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative on business and human rights, developed a framework for...

Peoples' behavior in the aftermath of natural disasters may depend critically on various conditions. In this paper we postulate three conditions, likely to occur after massive natural disasters, that can adversely affect the trusting behavior of people within communities: rivalry for scarce...

How does a shifting economic power balance between the United States and China affect the strategic choices of Latin American governments? During the last several decades, Latin America has often relied on a Western development model that aimed to attract global market capital. After excessive...