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Author:Wright, Mark L. J. 

The End of Rapid Population Growth

The world’s population had been doubling every 47 years to reach 8 billion today. But it is expected to peak at 10.5 billion before declining by century’s end.
On the Economy

Discussion Paper
Urban structure and growth

Most economic activity occurs in cities. This creates a tension between local increasing returns, implied by the existence of cities, and aggregate constant returns, implied by balanced growth. To address this tension, we develop a theory of economic growth in an urban environment. We show how the urban structure is the margin that eliminates local increasing returns to yield constant returns to scale in the aggregate, thereby implying a city size distribution that is well described by a power distribution with coefficient one: Zipf's Law. Under strong assumptions our theory produces Zipf's ...
Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics , Paper 141

Working Paper
Greed as a Source of Polarization

The political process in the United States appears to be highly polarized: evidence from voting patterns finds that the political positions of legislators have diverged substantially, while the largest campaign contributions come from the most extreme lobby groups and are directed to the most extreme candidates. Is the rise in campaign contributions the cause of the growing polarity of political views? In this paper, we show that, in standard models of lobbying and electoral competition, a free-rider problem amongst potential contributors leads naturally to a divergence in campaign ...
Working Papers , Paper 18-1

Conference Paper
Private capital flows, capital controls, and default risk

What has been the effect of the shift in emerging market capital flows toward private sector borrowers? Are emerging markets capital flows more efficient? If not, can controls on capital flows improve welfare? This paper studies these questions in a world with two forms of default risk. When private loans are enforceable, but there is the risk of national default, constrained efficient capital flows can be decentralized with private borrowing subject to individual borrowing constraints: no capital controls are necessary. However, when private agents may individually default, private lending ...
Proceedings , Issue Jun

Journal Article
Local Governments in the U.S.: A Breakdown by Number and Type

An analysis examines state variations in how the number and types of local governments in the U.S. have evolved since the 1940s.
The Regional Economist

How Did the U.S. Economy Do Last Year? Explaining Two Measures of GDP Growth

An analysis compares two ways to measure the annual growth of U.S. real GDP—Q4-over-Q4 and year-on-year—and why economists might prefer one over the other.
On the Economy

Working Paper
Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America, 1950-2007

After World War II, international capital flowed into slow-growing Latin America rather than fast-growing Asia. This is surprising as, everything else equal, fast growth should imply high capital returns. This paper develops a capital flow accounting framework to quantify the role of different factor market distortions in producing these patterns. Surprisingly, we find that distortions in labor markets ? rather than domestic or international capital markets ? account for the bulk of these flows. Labor market distortions that indirectly depress investment incentives by lowering equilibrium ...
Working Papers , Paper 2014-38

Working Paper
Private capital flows, capital controls, and default risk

What has been the effect of the shift in emerging market capital flows toward private sector borrowers? Are emerging market capital flows more efficient? If not, can controls on capital flows improve welfare? This paper shows that the answers depend on the form of default risk. When private loans are enforceable, but there is the risk that the government will default on behalf of all residents, private lending is inefficient and capital controls are potentially Pareto-improving. However, when private agents may individually default, capital flow subsidies are potentially Pareto-improving.
Working Paper Series , Paper 2004-34

Newsletter
How Much Debt Does the U.S. Government Owe?

The U.S. government is often referred to as the world?s biggest debtor. But how much debt does it owe? A visit to the website of the U.S. Department of the Treasury yields a bewildering array of different measures of U.S. federal government debt. Although the gross debt of the U.S. federal government is approaching $18 trillion, the debt that is subject to the debt limit is a few billion dollars smaller, while debt in the hands of the public is less than $13 trillion.
Chicago Fed Letter

Working Paper
Bretton Woods and the Reconstruction of Europe

The Bretton Woods international financial system, which was in place from roughly 1949 to 1973, is the most significant modern policy experiment to attempt to simultaneously manage international payments, international capital flows, and international currency values. This paper uses an international macroeconomic accounting methodology to study the Bretton Woods system and finds that it: (1) significantly distorted both international and domestic capital markets and hence the accumulation and allocation of capital; (2) significantly slowed the reconstruction of Europe, albeit while limiting ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-30

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