The recent passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act, along with numerous bank mergers over the past few years, has focused attention on the banking system in general and on the sector's industrial organization in particular. Because of this, economists have recently begun developing...

Illegal Mexico-U.S. migration has increased dramatically in recent decades. In this article, Pia Orrenius evaluates the causes of this migration and gives an overview of the enforcement and policy responses to date. Orrenius assesses the effectiveness of border enforcement by looking at...

Producing new money is inexpensive, making seigniorage--the revenues earned from creating new money--attractive. However, the social costs of faster money creation most likely are greater than the production costs. These marginal social costs may put limits on how much real seigniorage revenue...

This article examines the effects and desirability of paying interest on required reserves. Scott Freeman and Joseph Haslag demonstrate that a policy of paying interest on reserves can make everyone better off, even if the interest must be financed by a tax on capital. An essential part of this...

The monetary base is the sum of high-powered money and an adjustment factor that measures changes in reserve requirement ratios. This adjustment factor is calculated so that it responds to changes in deposit levels in addition to changes in reserve requirements. Consequently, researchers and...

In this article, Joseph Haslag surveys both the theoretical results and the empirical evidence relating inflation to per capita real GDP growth. Theory yields mixed results: a permanent change in inflation can raise, lower, or have no impact on per capita output or its rate of growth. The...

Developments in the distribution of income have received much attention over the past decade. Several analysts have argued that income gains have gone almost exclusively to the highest paid 20 percent of the population, leaving no gains to the remaining 80 percent. ; Joseph H. Haslag and Lori L....

Some economists advocate focusing less emphasis on monetary aggregates because the relationship of monetary aggregates to the ultimate goals of monetary policy is less reliable now than in the past. But the stability of the relationship between money growth and inflation is a testable...