The Central Bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, has a dual mandate to maintain both full employment and price stability. However, inflation-fighting had always eclipsed the full employment objective without much accountability. Today, the Federal Reserve provides regular testimony...

Using a VAR model of the American economy from 1984 to 2003, we find that, contrary to official claims, the Federal Reserve does not target inflation or react to inflation signals." Rather, the Fed reacts to the very real" signal sent by unemployment, in a way that suggests that a baseless fear...

Year-to-year economy-wide measures of income distribution, such as the Gini coefficient, are rarely available for long periods except in a few developed countries, and as a result few analyses of year-to-year changes in inequality exist. But wage and earnings data by industrial sectors are...