Knowledge that Transforms

The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant. This paper asks why. The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future.

Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panels linked to Social Security earnings records, we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975. We compare ordinary least squares and fixed-effect estimates. We find that among women who work, the marital earnings gap has all but disappeared in fixed-effects estimates for recent birth cohorts. In fact, among women without children, married women earn more than single women, implying a diminished role for specialization when children are not present. In contrast, the motherhood earnings gap remains large even for recent birth cohorts.

We study an investor who is unsure of the dynamics of the economy. Not only are parameters unknown, but the investor does not even know what order model to estimate. She estimates her consumption process nonparametrically—allowing potentially infinite-order dynamics—and prices assets using a pessimistic model that minimizes lifetime utility subject to a constraint on statistical plausibility. The equilibrium is exactly solvable and the pricing model always includes long-run risks. With risk aversion of 4.7, the model matches major facts about asset prices, consumption, and dividends. The paper provides a novel link between ambiguity aversion and nonparametric estimation.

In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and has restricted entry. Ride sharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, which use mobile internet technology to connect passengers and drivers, have begun to compete with traditional taxis. This paper examines the efficiency of ride sharing services vis-a-vis taxis. In most cities with data available, UberX drivers spend a significantly higher fraction of their time, and drive a substantially higher share of miles, with a passenger in their car than do taxi drivers. Reasons for this efficiency advantage are explored.

We study choice over prescription insurance plans by the elderly using government administrative data to evaluate how these choices evolve over time. We find large "foregone savings" from not choosing the lowest cost plan that has grown over time. We develop a structural framework to decompose the changes in "foregone welfare" from inconsistent choices into choice set changes and choice function changes from a fixed choice set. We find that foregone welfare increases over time due primarily to changes in plan characteristics such as premiums and out-of-pocket costs; we estimate little learning at either the individual or cohort level.

Changes in household debt and employment across regions of the U.S. during the Great Recession are highly correlated: regions where the decrease in household debt was most pronounced were also regions where the decline in employment was most severe. We show that the drop in employment in the regions that have experienced the largest decrease in household debt is mostly accounted for by changes in the labor wedge (deviations from a static consumption-leisure choice) as opposed to changes in real wages. We argue that such a pattern is consistent with fluctuations in debt constrain01/2ts in a standard Bewley-Aiyagari model.

This paper reexamines the behavior of inflation and unemployment and reaches four conclusions: 1) The U.S. Phillips curve is alive and well (at least as well as in the past). 2) Inflation expectations however have become steadily more anchored. 3) The slope of the curve has substantially declined. But the decline dates back to the 1980s rather than to the crisis. 4) The standard error of the residual in the relation is large, especially in comparison to the low level of inflation. Each of the four conclusions presents challenges for the conduct of monetary policy.

The fact that actual economic advance over time normally means producing and consuming different things is usually left implicit in modern models of economic growth. By contrast, qualitative change--new goods and services, and better versions of what already existed--is central to Robert Gordon's history of the improvement of American living standards since 1870. A major contribution of his fine-grained account of this experience is to make clear what this improvement has meant, and why it has mattered to ordinary citizens.

A single club model describes the collective production of both personal and social identity. Personal identity, how one perceives oneself, is formed through a process of cultural transmission. Social identity, how one is perceived by others, takes the form of collective reputation. Our model of identity-based organizations incorporates into the economics of identity insights from the economics of religion and cultural transmission. The identities that develop tend to be oppositional. Organizations devoted to more extreme identities are able to support higher levels of participation and collective action.

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-country datasets. While welfare is highly correlated with GDP per capita, deviations are often large. Western Europe looks considerably closer to the United States, emerging Asia has not caught up as much, and many developing countries are further behind. Each component we introduce plays a significant role in accounting for these differences, with mortality being most important.