Friedman (1968) - his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association - contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper's crucial argument.  That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift in...

This paper examines the relationship between norm enforcement and in-group favouritism behaviour.  Using a new two-stage allocation experiment with punishments, we investigate whether in-group favouritism is considered as a social norm in itself or as a violation of a different norm, such as...

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing at the group level: everyone wants to conform when they expect everyone else to conform.  There are multiple mechanisms that sustain social norms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in...

 I use variation in childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, as a natural experiment to explain variation in adult human capital.  I find that the Dust Bowl produced significant adverse impacts in later life, especially when exposure was in utero,...

Theory suggests that government should as far as possible smooth taxes and its recurrent consumption spending, which means that government debts should act as a shock absorber, and any planned adjustments in debt should be gradual.  This suggests that operational targets for governments (e.g....

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model to investigate to what extent labour market reforms undertaken by the Thatcher government in the late 1930s and the introduction of a constant inflation target in 1992 might have changed the UK economic outlook if they had been introduced in the early...

History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe), while there are also cases of dictators who have displayed remarkable improvements (like Jerry Rawlings of Ghana).  We show that such mutations can result from rational...

This paper derives closed-form and numerical solutions for relative risk aversion in a standard consumption-based model enriched with housing.  The presence of housing enables the household to hedge against unexpected shocks and may decrease relative risk aversion.  In addition, housing may...

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early...

This paper uses a VAR model estimated with Bayesian methods to identify the effect of productivity news shocks on labor market variables by imposing that they are orthogonal to current technology but they explain future observed technology.  In the aftermath of a positive news shock,...