Many explanations for the decline in real interest rates over the last 30 years point to the role that population aging or rising income inequality plays in increasing the long-run aggregate demand for assets. Notwithstanding the importance of such factors, the starting point of this paper is to...

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? In order to shed new light on this issue, this paper provides a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output-per-worker across countries over the period 1960-98. The main finding of the paper is that most...

Over the last few decades, real interest rates have trended downward in many countries. The most common explanation is that this reflects depressed demand due to demographic, technological and other real factors such as income inequality. In this paper we explore the claim that these trends may...

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? In order to shed new light on this issue, this paper provides a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output-per-worker across countries over the period 1960-98. The main finding of the paper is that most...

The impact of demographic developments on productivity is still a little-explored subject. The authors find a strong and unexpected link between slow labour productivity growth and rapid labour force growth over the period from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. They situate this finding in the...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the labour market participation rate of men and women age 15 to 24 from 1976 to 1998. The main question being asked is why youth participation rates fell precipitously during the 1990s? We look at two dimensions of this decline: changes in the fraction of...

This paper begins by reviewing the empirical properties of the Phillips Curve in both Canada and the U.S over the last forty years. In particular, we document the extent to which the slope of the Phillips Curve has declined in both countries over the nineties. Then, building upon a commonly used...

This paper documents several advantages associated with using state level consumption data to examine consumption behavior and especially to estimate the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES). In contrast to the results of Hall (1988) and Campbell and Mankiw (1989), we provide...

This paper provides a unifying framework for studying renegotiation of contracts in the presence of asymmetric information. We show that interim renegotiation does not constrain the set of contracts attainable with full commitment, regardless of whether renegotiation offers are made by the...

It is often argued that monetary instability reduces the informational content of market signals and thereby hinders the efficient allocation of investment. In this paper we use a signal extraction framework to give empirical content to this idea. In particular, we show why this framework...