Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we first document that the recent increase in income inequality in the United States has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality. Much of this divergence is due to different trends in within-group inequality, which...

International trade is frequently thought of as a production technology in which the inputs are exports and the outputs are imports. Exports are transformed into imports at the rate of the price of exports relative to the price of imports: the reciprocal of the terms of trade. Cast this way, a...

Unit root tests against trend break alternatives are based on the premise that the dating of the trend breaks coincides with major economic events with permanent effects on economic activity, such as wars and depressions. Standard economic theory, however, suggests that these events have large...

A prediction formula for geometrically declining sums of future forcing variables is derived for models in which the forcing variables are generated by a vector autoregressive-moving average process. This formula is useful in deducing and characterizing cross-equation restrictions implied by...

A major motivation for the wave of privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the last twenty years was a belief that privatization would increase economic efficiency. There are now many studies showing most privatizations achieved this goal. Our theme is that the productivity gains...

On our interpretation, real bills advocates favor unfettered intermediation, while their critics, who we call quantity theorists, favor legal restrictions on intermediation geared to separate “money” from “credit.” We display examples of economies in which quantity-theory assertions...

This paper quantitatively tests the “new trade theory” based on product differentiation, increasing returns, and imperfect competition. We employ a standard model, which allows both changes in the distribution of income among industrialized countries, emphasized by Helpman and Krugman...

Monetary policy is analyzed within a model that ignores transaction costs and appeals solely to legal restrictions on private intermediation to explain the coexistence of currency and interest-bearing default-free bonds. The interaction between such legal restrictions and monetary policy is...