This paper examines the association between stock market return expectations and financial wealth holdings of older adults using the 2016 wave of the Health and Retirement Study. Our study finds that less than 30% of individuals assigned a greater than 50% probability that the market will earn a...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience offer systematic evidence that fictional works exert a surprisingly strong influence on readers and have the power to shape their opinions and worldviews. Building on these findings, we study ‘Potterian economics’, the economic ideas, insights...

We consider which labor market variables are the most informative for estimating and nowcasting the US output gap using a multivariate trend-cycle decomposition. Although the unemployment rate clearly contains important cyclical information, it also appears to reflect more persistent movements...

Digital financial services (DFSs) may lower certain costs of accessing finance, but they bring new costs, including difficulties accessing mobile networks. Using the Demographic and Health Surveys and several geocoded databases in Nepal, the Philippines, Senegal and Tanzania, this paper studies...

That inequality varies within and between groups is well understood. We explore how inequality can also be "fractal," salient not only between sub-groups of groups but also between sub-groups of sub-groups. We demonstrate this, as a proof of concept using a limited sample, in the case of Bihar...

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential of social protection programs in mitigating labor market shocks. We examine the role of one of the world’s largest employment guarantee schemes, India’s MG-NREGA, in cushioning job losses in one of the worst affected economies due to the...

Objectives: Is the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) truly ‘irreversible’ as stated in the treaties? (i) From the sovereign debt crises of the 2010s, and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we draw the lesson that when exposed to large, systemic shocks the EMU faces a trilemma among...