This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...

With minimal sleight of hand, it is possible to transform the recent growth experience of the People's Republic of China from the extraordinary into the mundane. Systematic understatement of inflation by enterprises accounts for 2.5% growth per annum in the non-agricultural economy during the...

We explore the in- and out- of sample robustness of tests for consumer choice inconsistencies based on parameter restrictions in parametric models, with a focus on tests proposed by Ketcham, Kuminoff and Powers (2015). We start by arguing that non-parametric alternatives are inherently...

Thomas Piketty's (2014) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...

This paper uses the sequence of government budget constraints to motivate estimates of interest payments on the U.S. Federal government debt. We explain why our estimates differ conceptually and quantitatively from those reported by the U.S. government. We use our estimates to account for...

The ageing of the population presents a major fiscal challenge for the countries of Europe. The combination of increased longevity and a reduced birth rate will directly reduce the growth rates of the European economies by slowing the growth of the capital stock and by weakening the productivity...

We integrate a high-frequency monetary event study into a mixed-frequency macro-finance model and structural estimation. The model and estimation allow for jumps at Fed announcements in investor beliefs, providing granular detail on why markets react to central bank communications. We find that...

A large literature suggests that standard exchange rate models cannot outperform a random walk forecast and that the forward rate is not an optimal predictor of the spot rate. However, there is evidence that the term structure of forward premia contains valuable information for forecasting...

Macroeconomists acknowledge the contribution of human capital to economic growth, but their empirical studies define human capital solely in terms of schooling. In this paper, we extend production function models of economic growth to account for two additional variables that microeconomists...

In this paper we reconsider the evidence on capital account liberalization and growth. While we find indications of a positive association, the effects vary with time, with how capital account liberalization is measured, and with how the relationship is estimated. The evidence that the effects...