European economic performance has been disappointing in the 1980s. High unemployment has been a dominant policy issue, but in order to react properly, government authorities had to determine the causes of this unemployment. If inadequate aggregate demand were the source, expansionary fiscal or...

Estimates of the Phillips curve suggest that the low level of unemployment over the last few years should have produced a fairly significant increase in the rate of inflation, yet inflation has continued to fall. Some take this occurrence as evidence that the NAIRU has declined. Others argue...

Three years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released an examination of racial patterns in mortgage denial rates in the Boston area. The study was motivated by newly available data on mortgage applications, showing that black and Hispanic applicants were two to three times as likely to be...

The results of the study of discrimination in mortgage lending by Munnell, Browne, McEneaney, and Tootell (1992) have been questioned by some who claim that the authors failed to control adequately for the expected profitability of each loan. Critics assert that an examination of default rates...

Economic policymakers attempt to improve the welfare of their citizens, based on assumptions about how people think, feel, and behave, and on what they view as welfare-improving. Economists usually describe economic agents as fully informed and model them as striving to maximize a set of stable...

Recent news stories about corporate downsizing have increased concerns that the labor market is being permanently restructured. The press implicitly, and some economists explicitly, have concluded that this "restructuring" in the labor market has increased the rate of unemployment that is...

Recently, the benefits to monetary unification have been widely heralded. Advocates of European, as well as East and West German, monetary integration point repeatedly to the advantages the United States derives from possessing a single currency. Yet, the losses resulting from this policy have...

There has been a significant correlation between inward foreign direct investment in the United States and the U.S. real exchange rate since the 1970s. Two alternative reasons for this relationship are that the real exchange rate affects the relative cost of production and that the real exchange...

The most difficult problem facing monetary policymakers results from the long and variable lags in monetary policy's impact on the economy. The full effect of an interest rate change today is not realized for several quarters, so monetary policymakers must be forward-looking. Yet, it is...