Roughly one-third of households in rural America cannot subscribe to broadband Internet services at any price. This puts many rural communities at a disadvantage with respect to economic growth, job creation, educational opportunities, health care information, commerce, and more. Internet users...

Official estimates of the budgetary effects of proposed federal legislation generally exclude behavioral responses that would have macroeconomic effects. In my view, including such effects — an approach known as “dynamic scoring” — in estimates for certain proposals would improve the...

A large output gap accompanied by stable inflation close to its target calls for further monetary accommodation, but the zero lower bound on interest rates has robbed the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the usual tool for its provision. We examine how public statements of FOMC intentions...

Global climate change will have environmental, eco­nomic, and potentially even political and security impacts on Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Combined with rising population levels, climate change will ag­gravate existing challenges regarding water scarcity and food...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...

The recent plunge in U.S. home prices left many households that had borrowed voraciously during the credit boom highly leveraged, with very high levels of debt relative to the value of their assets. Analysts often assert that this “debt overhang” created a need for household deleveraging...

To understand the diverse impact of the crisis across emerging market countries, we explore the role of two shocks - the collapse in trade and the sharp decline in financial flows - in the transmission of the crisis from advanced economies to emerging market countries. We first develop a simple...