This study investigates Okun’s law in OECD countries by examining estimates for male and female age cohorts for the period 1998–2012. We find that the estimated Okun coefficients are not always statistically significant for each subgroup of the population. Our results also highlight a...

This paper empirically tests for convergence in consumer price indices across 17 major cities in US over the 1918–2008 period. By using the novel OLS estimator introduced by Bao, Y., Dhongde, S., 2009. Testing convergence in income distribution. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 71,...

Yes, they are! We find that although there is a surprisingly high dispersion of individual forecasts and some dissent on the Federal Funds target, the FOMC’s individual behavior is well described by a Taylor-type rule.

We analyze more than 40,000 forecasts of the annual growth rate of the money supply, the inflation rate, and the growth rate for eleven Asian–Pacific countries between 1994 and 2011. We document that forecasters believe in nominal effects of future monetary policy.

The Livingston survey data are used to investigate whether economists’ forecasts are consistent with the Taylor principle. Consistency with the Taylor principle is strong for academics and Federal Reserve economists, and less strong for private-sector economists.

New estimates of an aggregate long-term production function for the post-war U.S. economy are reported. The results indicate that this long-term aggregate production function exhibits a slight but statistically significant increasing returns to scale. Since virtually all econometric growth...

We consider a dual labor market with a frictional formal sector and a competitive informal sector. We show that the size of the informal sector is generally too large compared to the optimal allocation of the workers. It follows that our results give a rationale to informality-reducing policies.

The Family and Medical and Leave Act of 1993 in the US expanded workplace provisions for leave-taking by working parents. In this note, I propose a method to estimate the effect of the FMLA on the productivity of working parents using variation in the labor share of income. I find that the FMLA...

Recently, there has been renewed interest in labor search and matching models that incorporate a life-cycle structure by assuming finite horizons. Existing studies provide detailed analyses on the age dynamics of job creation and destruction, assuming that workers of all ages search for jobs in...

We assess the employment impact of the Lisbon Strategy, examining long-run growth in total, female and old-age employment rates from 1994 to 2009. The Strategy had some impact, especially for old-age workers, but no improvement ensued from its mid-term reassessment.