The U.S. dollar’s nominal effective exchange rate closely tracks global financial conditions, which themselves show a cyclical pattern. Over that cycle, world asset prices, leverage, and capital flows move in concert with global growth, especially influencing the fortunes of emerging and...

Durable goods attenuate the power of forward guidance. The extensive and intensive margins of durable goods demand are both more sensitive to the contemporaneous user cost than to future user costs. Changes in the contemporaneous real interest rate directly affect the contemporaneous user cost...

How should international economic policy address climate change? Does trade cause deforestation and endangered species depletion? How does globalization affect air and water pollution? Do trade and investment create a race to the bottom in environmental policy? How important are environmental...

This paper examines the evidence from randomized evaluations of sector-focused training programs that target low-wage workers and combine upfront screening, occupational and soft skills training, and wraparound services. The programs generate substantial and persistent earnings gains (11 to 40...

We examine gender differences in financial literacy among high school students in Italy using data from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Gender differences in financial literacy are large among the young in Italy. They are present in all regions and are...

African-American motorists may adjust their driving in response to increased scrutiny by police. In daylight, when their race is more easily observable, minority motorists are the only group less likely to have fatal motor vehicle accidents. In Massachusetts and Tennessee, we find that...

Research on the political and social impacts of financial crises has focused chiefly on free market economies, hindering our understanding of their effects in other settings. We exploit an episode of a financial crisis that hit the Israeli kibbutzim to study its impact in a socialist context....

The US spends more than 4 trillion dollars per year on health care, largely conducted by private providers and reimbursed by insurers. A major concern in this system is overbilling, waste and fraud by providers, who face incentives to misreport on their claims in order to receive higher...

Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government's ability to observe it and...

Relational contracts - informal self-enforcing agreements sustained by repeated interactions - are ubiquitous both within and across organizational boundaries. This review highlights recent empirical contributions in selected areas. We begin by reviewing some recent work that explicitly takes...