There is an uncomfortably large gulf between academic research and what policy economists use to understand the economy. A Practical Guide to Macroeconomics shows how economists at policy institutions approach important real-world questions and explains why existing academic work - theoretical...

We survey the evidence on CPI bias and provide our best estimate of its magnitude. We also identify a "weighting" bias that has not been quantified previously. We estimate that the CPI currently overstates the rate of change in the cost of living by about 0.9 percentage point per year, with a...

This paper uses an intertemporal, disequilibrium framework to analyze the rapid increase in personal savings that has taken place in China since 1979. A theoretical model of savings behavior under rationing is developed, and a specification of a "virtual" price index is derived. The virtual...

We examine the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity using the microdata underlying the BLS's employment cost index. This dataset has two significant advantages over those used previously. It is an extensive, nationally representative dataset based on establishment records and is thus free...