Research Papers
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Working Paper Series
Persistent Effects of Autonomous Demand Expansions
Feb 2018
The prevailing wisdom that aggregate demand ‘shocks’ determine short-run cyclical fluctuations around a supply-determined equilibrium growth rate and an associated equilibrium unemployment rate (or NAIRU) has been called into question by various streams of literature in the last decades. Specifically, a recently revived literature on hysteresis finds significant persistence in the effects of recessions and negative aggregate demand shocks (Blanchard et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015).
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Working Paper Series
Inequality in the 21st century
Jan 2018
A critical analysis of Piketty’s work
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Working Paper Series
Lending a Hand: How Small Black Businesses Supported the Civil Rights Movement
Jan 2018
A large literature has detailed the seminal roles played in the Civil Rights Movement by activists, new political organizations, churches, and philanthropies. But black-owned businesses also provided a behind-the-scenes foundation for the movement’s success.
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Working Paper Series
Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election
Jan 2018
The U.S. presidential election of 2016 featured frontal challenges to the political establishments of both parties and perhaps the most shocking election upset in American history.
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Conference paper
$MeToo: The Economic Cost of Sexual Harassment
Jan 2018
To get justice, targets must show measurable harm: economists can help.
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Conference paper
Veiling
Dec 2017
Veiling among Muslim women is modeled as a commitment mechanism that limits temptation to deviate from religious norms of behavior.
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Conference paper
Transition to Slower Population Growth: Demography and its Effect on Real Interest Rates
Dec 2017
The past 30 years has witnessed a worldwide decrease in real interest rates. We demonstrate that a large part of the fall in interest rates can be explained by changes in demography, which are as the result of a sudden fall in fertility rates across all of the advanced economies in the early 1970s.
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Conference paper
Endogenous Technology Adoption and R&D as Sources of Business Cycle Persistence
Dec 2017
We examine the hypothesis that the slowdown in productivity following the Great Recession was in significant part an endogenous response to the contraction in demand that induced the downturn.
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Conference paper
Secular Demand Stagnation in the 21st Century U.S. Economy
Dec 2017
The concern that an economy could experience persistent, and in some sense unusual, weakness goes back to Keynes’s General Theory and led Alvin Hansen to coin the term “secular stagnation.”
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Conference paper
Aging, Output per capita and Secular Stagnation
Dec 2017
This paper shows that aging has positive effect on output growth per capital at positive interest rates, due to capital deepening.
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Conference paper
Stagnation Traps
Dec 2017
We provide a Keynesian growth theory in which pessimistic expectations can lead to very persistent, or even permanent, slumps characterized by high unemployment and weak growth.
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Conference paper
Inequality and Aggregate Demand
Dec 2017
We explore the transmission mechanism of income inequality to output.
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Commentary
Some Thoughts on Secular Stagnation, Loanable Funds and the ZLB
Dec 2017
I have read the various conference papers and am struck by the fact that many use the (omnipresent New-Keynesian) model of an aggregate loanable funds market to diagnose secular stagnation and investigate possible remedies.
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Conference paper
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015
Dec 2017
This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century.
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Conference paper
Are Low Real Interest Rates Here to Stay?
Dec 2017
Long-term real interest rates across the world are low, having fallen by about 450 basis points (bps) over the past thirty years.