The recent European experience of high persistent unemployment has led to the development of theories of unemployment hysteresis embodying the idea that the equilibrium unemployment rate depends on the history of the actual unemployment rate. This paper summarizes two directions of research on...

Modern neoclassical theories of the business cycle posit that aggregate fluctuations in consumption and employment are the consequence of dynamic optimizing behavior by economic agents who face no quantity constraint. In this paper, we estimate an explicit model :f this type. In particular, we...

The paper questions the common view that share price increases of firms involved in hostile takeovers measure efficiency gains from acquisitions. Even if such gains exist, most of the increase in the combined value of the target and the acquirer is likely to come from stakeholder wealth losses,...

Analyses of the role of rational speculators in financial markets usually presume that such investors dampen price fluctuations by trading against liquidity or noise traders. This conclusion does not necessarily hold when noise traders follow positive-feedback investment strategies buy when...

The economic changes associated with globalization tighten financial pressures on governments of high-income countries by increasing the demand for government spending while making it more costly to raise tax revenue. Greater international mobility of economic activity, and associated...

This paper uses Taylor's model of overlapping contracts to show that increased wage and price flexibility can easily be destabilizing. This result arises because of the Mundell effect. While lower prices increase output, the expectation of falling prices decreases output. Simulations based on...

Taxes on corporate distributions have traditionally been regarded as a "double tax" on corporate income. This view implies that while the total effective tax rate on corporate source income affects real economic decisions, the distribution of this tax burden between the shareholders and the...

The claim that financial markets are efficient is backed by an implicit argument that misinformed "noise traders" can have little influence on asset prices in equilibrium. If noise traders' beliefs are sufficiently different from those of rational agents to significantly affect prices, then...

Consensus forecasts for the global economy over the medium and long term predict the world's economic gravity will substantially shift towards Asia and especially towards the Asian Giants, China and India. While such forecasts may pan out, there are substantial reasons that China and India may...

This paper examines the relationship between inflation and the return on individual corporate securities. This question is of substantial importance in light of the puzzling behavior of the stock market over the last decade. Conventional financial theory holds that equity should be a good...