This paper proposes some new measures of intergenerational persistence based on the idea of characterizing the memory of origin in the stochastic process that links the socioeconomic classes of parents and children. We introduce "memory curves" for all future generations given any initial...

Three current account imbalances - one very large deficit (the United States) and two surpluses (Japan and the Euro area) - are subjected to a minimalist structural interpretation. Though simple, this interpretation enables us to assess how much of each of the imbalances require a real exchange...