This paper is a non-technical and somewhat philosophical essay, that seeks to investigate the relationship between economics and reality. More precisely, it asks how reality in the form of empirical evidence does or does not influence economic thinking and theory. In particular, which role do...

Monetary policy and the welfare cost of inflation cannot be studied without some specification of allowable fiscal instruments. Here, feasible policies are implied by the frictions imposed to get roles for money and credit. The model has extreme versions of an above-ground economy and a benign...

This paper examines poverty in the United States from 1960 through 2005. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty gaps have changed over time, explore how these trends differ across family types, contrast these trends for several different income and consumption measures of poverty, and...

We analyze the equilibrium size of the active management industry and the role of historical data---how investors use it to decide how much to invest in the industry, and how researchers use it to judge whether the industry's size is reasonable. As the industry's size increases, every manager's...

This paper contributes to the literature on the finance-growth link by presenting new findings based on a new, larger dataset that improves over earlier studies in its greater coverage in terms of time periods and countries, as well as the incorporation of additional control variables like...

We develop new evidence on the cumulative earnings losses associated with job displacement, drawing on longitudinal Social Security records for U.S. workers from 1974 to 2008. In present value terms, men lose an average of 1.4 years of re-displacement earnings if displaced in mass layoff events...

Using a novel, hand-collected dataset of Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) investments in public equities, private firms, and real estate, we establish what SWF portfolios look like. SWF allocations are balanced across risky asset classes, very home-region biased, and very biased toward certain...

Over the last decades, large labor intensive countries, like China, have played a growing role in world trade. Using the factor proportions theory, this paper investigates the dynamic effects of economic growth consequent to international trade between countries with different factor...

Variance in academic performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that whether students fail or thrive depends not only on circumstance, but also on relatively stable individual differences in how children respond to circumstance. More academically talented...

Schools that enroll disproportionately high percentages of pupils from low-income families are widely believed to have negative consequences for student performance. Prior research has investigated the relationship of school poverty and outcomes in numerous ways, but the basic proposition is...