We show that the effects of inflation on growth change substantially as the inflation rate rises. Moreover the nonlinearities are quite different for industrial economies than for developing countries. We find that the threshold at which inflation first begins to seriously negatively affect...

International capital flows to developing countries have taken on considerable policy importance in recent years. There is disagreement, however, about whether financial capital mobility has become so high that developing countries have little ability to sterilize capital flows. This paper...

The paper explains the fall in the NAIRU from more than six pecent in the '80s to below five percent in the '90s. There is a high degree of persistence in unemployment rates across U.S. states over longer time spans. We use cross-sectional and time-series variations in U.S. regional unemployment...

This paper explains why so many real life phenomena generate regression towards the mean or mean reversion results. We start our analysis by revisiting Galton's original paper on the height of children and the height of parents. We then show that the regression towards the mean result also holds...

We compare the distributions of U.S. state per worker output and state per capita personal income, and document their changes over time. Our analysis reveals important differences between the two distributions. Most notably, we find geographical differences are less important in understanding...

This paper investigates the effect of minimum wages on employment using a panel of US state-based data. We estimate a minimalist dynamic version of the specification implied by neo-classical theory. We find statistically and economically significant effects of minimum wages on youth employment....