Search Results
Journal Article
Is China's economy losing its luster?
Journal Article
Dollarization and monetary sovereignty: the case of Argentina
In January, President Menim of Argentina proposed strengthening his country's commitment to monetary stability by replacing the peso with the U.S. dollar. Dollarization leaves Argentina without a lender of last resort, but the Federal Reserve's current operating procedure combines with existing Argentine arrangements to mitigate this drawback.
Working Paper
Bracket creep in the age of indexing: have we solved the problem?
An examination of the inflation-indexing provisions contained in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Working Paper
Marginal tax rates and income inequality: a quantitative-theoretic analysis
An Auerbach-Kotlikoff (AK) overlapping-generations model is used to examine how changes in marginal income-tax rate structures affect the distribution of income, drawing on actual changes to the U.S. tax code. This approach builds on AK by allowing for many different cohort types, and hence for a nontrivial endogenous distribution of income.
Working Paper
Computable general-equilibrium models and monetary policy advice
An argument that variations of extant general-equilibrium monetary models can generate real-time economic forecasts comparable in accuracy to those contained in the Federal Reserve Board's "Greenbook" briefing documents.
Journal Article
In search of the NAIRU
The relationship between the unemployment rate and the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is presumed to be an inflationary bellwether, but recent inflation predictions based on it have not been successful. The authors explore the reasons for this failure and suggest that it may be time to replace the NAIRU.
Journal Article
Growth and the internet: surfing to prosperity?
Do countries that inhibit the quick integration of new technologies pay a price in slower economic growth? This commentary suggests they do. Focusing on the level of Internet use to indicate the absorption rate of emerging computer technologies, the authors argue that faster technology absorption leads to increased economic growth.
Journal Article
Assessing fundamental tax reform
A look at how some basic tax reform proposals stack up against four, sometimes competing, requirements laid out by President Clinton in a December 1997 speech: Is the proposal fiscally responsible? Will it be good for the economy? Will it lead to a simpler tax system? And finally, is it fair to all Americans?
Discussion Paper
Benefits Cliffs and the Financial Incentives for Career Advancement: A Case Study of the Health Care Services Career Pathway
Benefits cliffs, which occur when earnings gains are offset by the loss of public benefits, have long been recognized to create financial disincentives for low-income individuals to earn more income. In this paper, the authors develop a new methodology to study benefits cliffs in the context of career advancement. The authors illustrate the change in net financial resources for an individual pursuing the health care services career pathway from certified nursing assistant (CNA) to licensed practical nurse (LPN) to registered nurse (RN). Accounting for increases in taxes and the loss of public ...
Working Paper
Firm-specific capital, nominal rigidities and the business cycle
This paper formulates and estimates a three-shock US business cycle model. The estimated model accounts for a substantial fraction of the cyclical variation in output and is consistent with the observed inertia in inflation. This is true even though firms in the model reoptimize prices on average once every 1.8 quarters. The key feature of our model underlying this result is that capital is firm-specific. If we adopt the standard assumption that capital is homogeneous and traded in economy-wide rental markets, we find that firms reoptimize their prices on average once every 9 quarters. We ...