Search Results
Working Paper
A Market Interpretation of Treatment Effects
Markets, likened to an invisible hand, often appear to contradict econometric assumptions that rule out spillovers of one person’s treatment on another’s outcomes. This paper provides a simple statistical framework highlighting that controls are indirectly affected by the treatment through the market. Further, the effect of the treatment on the treated reveals only part of the consequence for the treated of treating the entire market. When combined with economic theory, our framework leads to a new application of Marshall’s Laws of Derived Demand that relates econometric estimates of ...
Conference Paper
The optimum quantity of money: theory and evidence
Working Paper
Inflation and the size of government
It is commonly supposed in public and academic discourse that inflation and big government are related. We show that economic theory delivers such a prediction only in special cases. As an empirical matter, inflation is significantly positively related to the size of government mainly when periods of war and peace are compared. We find a weak positive peacetime time series correlation between inflation and the size of government and a negative cross-country correlation of inflation with non-defense spending.
Working Paper
Difference-in-Differences in the Marketplace
Price theory says that the most important effects of policy and technological change are often found beyond their first point of contact. This appears opposed to econometric methods that rule out spillovers of one person's treatment on another's outcomes. This paper uses the industry model from price theory to represent the statistical concepts of treatments and controls. When treated and control observations are in the same market, the controls are indirectly affected by the treatment. Moreover, even the effect of the treatment on the treated reveals only part of the consequence for the ...
Discussion Paper
The demand for money by firms: some additional empirical results
COMPUSTAT data on 12,000 firms for the years 1956-1992 indicate that large firms hold less cash as a percentage of sales than do small ones. Whether comparisons are made within or across industries, the elasticity of cash balances with respect to sales is about 0.75. Firms headquartered in counties with high wages hold more money for a given level of sales, a finding consistent with the idea that time can substitute for money in the provision of transactions services. The estimates are consistent with both scale economies in the holding of money and secular declines in velocity.
Journal Article
Inflation and the size of government
It is commonly supposed in public and academic discourse that inflation and big government are related. The authors show that economic theory delivers such a prediction only in special cases. As an empirical matter, inflation is significantly positively related to the size of government mainly when periods of war and peace are compared. The authors find a weak positive peacetime time series correlation between inflation and the size of government and a negative cross-country correlation of inflation with non-defense spending.
Working Paper
Inflation and the Size of Government
It is commonly supposed in public and academic discourse that inflation and big government are related. We show that economic theory delivers such a prediction only in special cases. As an empirical matter, inflation is significantly positively related to the size of government mainly when periods of war and peace are compared. We find a weak positive peacetime time series correlation between inflation and the size of government and a negative cross-country correlation of inflation with non-defense spending.
Discussion Paper
Microfoundations and macro implications of indivisible labor
I show that the indivisible labor models of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992) and many others are, when aggregated across persons with the same marginal utility of income, equivalent to the divisible labor model of Lucas and Rapping (1969); any data on aggregate hours and earnings generated by the divisible (indivisible) model can be generated by some parameterization of the indivisible (divisible) model. The same is true when macro data are obtained by aggregating over time and across people. This equivalence means that the ...