This paper employs a game-theoretic framework and a comparative historical analysis to study the impact of the Great Depression on corporate welfarism,' i.e., employers' voluntary provisions of non-wage benefits, greater employment security, and employee representation to their blue-collar...

This paper investigates the potential reasons for the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008-09. Unemployment rates did not change substantially in Germany, increased and...

The financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession left the U.S. economy in an injured state. In 2013, output was 13 percent below its trend path from 1990 through 2007. Part of this shortfall--2.2 percentage points out of the 13--was the result of lingering slackness in the labor market in the...

We provide a comprehensive view of widening income inequality in the United States contrasting conditions since 1980 with those in earlier postwar years. We argue that the income distribution in each period was strongly shaped by a set of economic institutions. The early postwar years were...

Network connections within MNCs seem to improve export market shares for Asian affiliates of those MNCs. In particular, Asian affiliates of U.S. MNCs export more to markets where their parent firms' exports to affiliates are larger, and less to markets where their parent firms export more to...

During the 1980's and early 1990's, the cigarette markets in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand were opened to U.S. cigarettes through actions taken under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act and its subsequent amendments. Using pooled annual time-series data from ten Asian countries, the...

Over the past 60 years, the U.S. financial sector has grown from 2.3% to 7.7% of GDP. While the growth in the share of value added has been fairly linear, it hides a dramatic change in the composition of skills and occupations. In the early 1980s, the financial sector started paying higher wages...

The principal rationales that give rise to financial intermediation are benefits of size and specialization, the diversification of specific asset risks, and the pooling of even broader classes of risk. Each is a significant factor in accounting for the U.S. economy's reliance on intermediation....