Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of...

China’s high corporate savings rate is commonly claimed to be a key driver for the country’s large current account surplus. The mainstream explanation for high corporate savings is a combination of windfall profits in state-owned firms, especially in resource sectors, and...

It is not surprising that the U.S. has been by far the world’s largest shock producer in this crisis. The big shock absorbers on the other hand were Japan, Russia and Germany, whose exports shrank more than their imports.