U.S. foreign trade has grown much more rapidly than GDP in recent decades. But there is no consensus as to why. More than half of U.S. foreign trade consists of arms-length and intra-firm trade activity by multinational corporations (MNCs). Thus, in order to better understand the growth of...

This paper uses micro panel data to examine differences in the cyclical variability of employment, hours, and real wages for skilled and unskilled workers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that, at the aggregate level, skilled and unskilled workers are subject to essentially the same...

In this paper, we use micro panel data to examine the effects of oil price changes on employment and real wages, at the aggregate and industry levels. We also measure differences in the employment and wage responses for workers differentiated on the basis of skill level. We find that oil price...

To measure the extent of incomplete information about brand qualities faced by consumers, recent research in marketing and economics has extended traditional static choice models to explicitly allow for consumer learning. These models tend to be complicated and make stringent assumptions such as...

Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The...

I examine effects of labor income taxation in life‐cycle models with human capital accumulation. In this case, the opportunity cost of time equals the wage plus returns to work experience. This has several interesting consequences: First, the data appear consistent with larger labor supply...