How rigid are producer prices? Conventional wisdom is that producer prices are more rigid than and so play less of an allocative role than do consumer prices. In the 1987-2008 micro data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the PPI, we find that producer prices for finished goods...

The U.S. mortgage market has experienced phenomenal change over the last 35 years. Most observers believe that the deregulation of the banking industry and financial markets generally has played an important part in this transformation. This paper develops and implements a technique for...

This paper provides new evidence on job search intensity of the unemployed in the U.S., modeling job search intensity as time allocated to job search activities. The main findings are: 1) the average unemployed worker in the U.S. devotes about 41 minutes to job search on weekdays, which is...

This paper surveys China’s globalization in terms of in and out flows of goods, capital, information/technology and people from both the Chinese and the Western, especially American, points of view. It includes a discussion of the issue of revaluation of the RMB.

We propose a novel theory of self-ful?lling ?uctuations in the labor market. A ?rm employing an additional worker generates positive externalities on other ?rms, because employed workers have more income to spend and have less time to shop for low prices than unemployed workers. We quantify...

This paper explores how the tax design called the X tax could alleviate the complexities and avoidance opportunities plaguing the existing U.S. system for taxing international business income. In addition to laying out the general efficiency, equity and administrative characteristics of an X...

The EITC is designed to encourage work. But EITC-induced increases in labor supply may drive wages down, shifting the intended transfer toward employers and hurting non- EITC low-skill workers. I exploit variation across family types and skill levels to identify the eect of a large EITC...

After giving a brief monetary history of the Chinese macro-economy, this paper presents an error correction model to explain the inflation rate from 1954 to 2002 by its past change, the change in log (M2/real output) and the deviation in the previous period of log price level from a regression...

The inertia of the local-currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange-rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in International Economics. This paper develops a framework for identifying the sources of local-currency price stability. The empirical approach exploits...

Several aspects of the difficulties of policy at the zero lower bound are discussed: The difficulty of credible commitment to higher future inflation, as most New Keynesian models imply is necessary; the need for fiscal and monetary policy coordination; the pitfalls in the taking of quasi-fiscal...