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Prices and Supply Disruptions during Natural Disasters

Cavallo, Alberto Felipe; Rigobon, Roberto; Cavallo, Eduardo - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

We study the daily behavior of supermarket prices and product availability following two recent natural disasters: the 2010 earthquake in Chile and the 2011 earthquake in Japan. In both cases there was an immediate and persistent effect on product availability. The number of goods available for...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011105941

What Drives Aggregate Investment?

Bachmann, Rüdiger; Zorn, Peter - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

Using firm-level survey data for the West German manufacturing sector, this paper revisits the technology-driven business cycle hypothesis for the case of aggregate investment. We construct a survey-based measure of technology shocks to gauge their contribution to short-run investment...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010969200

News Shocks

Barsky, Robert B.; Sims, Eric R. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2009

We implement a new approach for the identification of "news shocks" about future technology. In a VAR featuring a … measure of aggregate technology and several forward-looking variables, we identify the news shock as the shock orthogonal to … technology innovations that best explains future variation in technology. In the data, news shocks account for the bulk of low …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005027105

What We Know and Do Not Know About the Natural Rate of Unemployment

Blanchard, Olivier; Katz, Lawrence F. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 1996

Over the past three decades, a large amount of research has attempted to identify the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment. It is this body of work we assess in this paper. We reach two main conclusions. First, there has been considerable theoretical progress over the past 30 years....

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005718798

Productivity and the Welfare of Nations

Basu, Susanto; Schiantarelli, Fabio; Servén, Luis; … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

We show that the welfare of a country's infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a first order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences across...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011227907

Lumpy Investment, Lumpy Inventories

Bachmann, Rüdiger; Ma, Lin - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

How do microeconomic frictions and microeconomic heterogeneity affect macroeconomic dynamics? We revisit the recent claim in the literature that nonconvex capital adjustment costs do not matter for aggregate dynamics. We argue that the neutrality of fixed adjustment frictions in general...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011188529

Under-Savers Anonymous: Evidence on Self-Help Groups and Peer Pressure as a Savings Commitment Device

Meier, Stephan; Kast, Felipe; Pomeranz, Dina - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

We test the effectiveness of self-help peer groups as a commitment device for precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microentrepreneurs in Chile. The first experiment finds that self-help peer groups are a powerful tool to increase savings (the number of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010821682

On Financing Retirement with an Aging Population

Prescott, Edward C.; McGrattan, Ellen R. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

A problem facing the United States is financing retirement consumption as its population ages. Proposals for switching to a saving-for-retirement system that do not rely on high payroll taxes have been challenged on the grounds that welfare for some cohorts will fall. We show how to devise a...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010821975

The Labor Wedge: MRS vs. MPN

Karabarbounis, Loukas - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

Do fluctuations of the labor wedge, defined as the gap between the firm's marginal product of labor (MPN) and the household's marginal rate of substitution (MRS), reflect fluctuations of the gap between the MPN and the real wage or fluctuations of the gap between the real wage and the MRS? For...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010785595

Firms' Optimism and Pessimism

Bachmann, Rüdiger; Elstner, Steffen - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

Are firms' expectations systematically too optimistic or too pessimistic? Does it matter? We use micro data from the West German manufacturing subset of the IFO Business Climate Survey to infer quarterly production changes at the firm level and combine them with production expectations over a...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010969204