The computerization of retailing has made price dispersion a norm in the United States, so that any given list price or transactions price is an increasingly imperfect measure of a product's resource cost. As a consequence, measuring the real output of retailers has become increasingly...

This paper examines the potential impact of the federal tax treatment of housing, which provides tax advantages that increase with income and house value, on the pattern of development in U.S. metropolitan areas. The authors argue that the tax treatment of housing is likely to have impacts on...

We find that technology's effect on employment varies greatly across manufacturing industries. Some industries exhibit a temporary reduction in employment in response to a permanent increase in TFP, whereas far more industries exhibit an employment increase in response to a permanent TFP shock....

In the late 1980s James Stock and Mark Watson developed for the U.S. economy an alternative coincident index to the one now published by the Conference Board. They used the Kalman filter to estimate a latent dynamic factor for the national economy and designated the common factor as the...

This paper explores whether there was an economically significant differential in market-based risk between bank holding companies (BHCs) with Section 20 subsidiaries – subsidiaries that were authorized by the Federal Reserve to conduct bank-ineligible securities activities – and BHCs...

In this paper, the authors document a pronounced trend toward deconcentration of metropolitan employment during the postwar period in the United States. The employment share of initially more dense metro areas declined and those of initially less dense metro areas rose. Motivated by this...

This paper documents the implications of arbitrage costs on the behavior of exchange rates in an open-economy liquidity model. The main motivation behind the paper is the growing evidence that the well-documented departures from purchasing power parity are due to a failure of the law of one...

The authors develop a life-cycle model to study the effects of house price changes on household consumption and welfare. The model explicitly incorporates the dual feature of housing as both a consumption good and an investment asset and allows for costly adjustments in housing and mortgage...

Pricing should speed up the substitution of low cost electronic payments for expensive paper-based transactions and cash. But by how much? Norway has explicitly priced individual payment transactions and rapidly shifted to electronic payments while the Netherlands has experienced the same shift...