A major aspect of social policy in the United States during the 1960's was the effort to increase employment and lessen the extent of poverty. The effects of these efforts, in particular those of the Manpower Development and Training Act, have been discussed by economists solely within the framework of empirical cost-benefit analysis. In this note we take a different approach to the study of manpower programs. Under a set of admittedly restrictive assumptions we analyze the relative efficiencies in reducing unemployment of several alternative subsidy programs. It should be remembered that the reduction of unemployment is merely one goal of these programs and that the usefulness of our result must be qualified accordingly.

Credit markets, including the market for bank loans, are characterized by imperfect and asymmetric information. These informational frictions can interact with other economic forces to produce periods of credit-market stress, in which intermediation is unusually costly and households and businesses have difficulty obtaining credit. A high level of credit-market stress, as in a severe financial crisis, may in turn produce a deep and prolonged recession. I present evidence that financial distress and disrupted credit markets were important sources of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Changes in the state of credit markets also play a role in “ garden-variety” business cycles and in the transmission of monetary policy to the economy.

This paper assesses the effects of capital gains taxes on investment in the Republic of Korea (hereafter, Korea), where capital gains tax rates vary at the firm level by firm size. Following a reform in 2014, firms with a tax cut increased investment by 34 log points and issued more equity by 9 cents per dollar of lagged revenue, relative to unaffected firms. Additionally, the effects were larger for firms that appeared more cash constrained or went public after the reform. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the “traditional view” predicting that lower payout taxes spur equity-financed investment by increasing marginal returns on investment.

Examining the most heavily cited publications in labor economics from the early 1990s, I show that few of over 3,000 articles, citing them directly, replicates them. They are replicated more frequently using data from other time periods and economies, so that the validity of their central ideas has typically been verified. This pattern of scholarship suggests, beyond the currently required depositing of data and code upon publication, that there is little need for formal mechanisms for replication. The market for scholarship already produces replications of non-laboratory applied research.

The purpose of these letters is to help the individual obtain a job. When your commitment to the person is very weak, refuse to write rather than providing a letter that guarantees the subject a rejection. The decision is especially delicate when a colleague asks for a recommendation. In that case, agree to write, but end the letter by stating that you hope the colleague stays. (Even if you want the colleague to leave, anything less than admiration reduces the chance of achieving your mutual goal.) If the colleague is someone who has been denied tenure, refusing to write is particularly odious. In your letter:

In a recent article in this Review (1983), William Shughart and Robert Tollison (S-T) argue that an important motivation for expansion of the money supply is to finance the growth of the Fed's bureaucracy: specifically, that the level of Fed employment is a determinant of the nominal monetary base. Using a public choice framework, they present a money supply equation which yields a positive and statistically significant relationship between the monetary base and the total employment of the Federal Reserve System. While this conclusion is certainly interesting, the analysis suffers from a number of important conceptual, empirical, and methodological problems. Shughart-Tollison point out that the revenue side of the Federal Reserve's budget is closely linked to its monetary policy operations. Through open market purchases of securities, the Fed generates a stream of interest payments. Because monitoring of this income stream is difficult and costly, Congress has elected to impose the constraint that excess revenues be returned to the Treasury. As a result, the Fed pays its current operating expenses out of this current interest income and then turns over the remainder to the Treasury. Because the central bank cannot retain the profits it generates, S-T argue that the Fed will exhibit a form of expense-preference behavior in purchasing more amenities than are justified by costminimizing money production-in particular, by expanding Fed employment. In addition, since expansionary monetary policy increases opportunities for this profit/amenities tradeoff, Fed policies are likely to have a built-in inflationary bias. To test this hypothesis, S-T develop a regression model that estimates the monetary base as a function of Fed employment, real GNP, a number of financial variables, and linear and nonlinear time trend variables. Using annual time-series data from 1915 to 1981, they find that the employment variable is a significant determinant of the money supply, with their model explaining about 95 percent of the variation in the monetary base. To check that employment causes monetary expansion and not the other way around, S-T employ the test of causality developed by C. W. J. Granger (1969) and Christopher Sims (1972). This test estimates two-sided

In recent years, the relationship between income distribution and the process of development has come under increasing scrutiny. Much of the debate has focused on the hypothesis, originally advanced by Simon Kuznets, that the secular behavior of inequality follows an inverted U-shaped pattern with inequality first increasing and then decreasing with development. This hypothesis has become so much a part of the conventional wisdom on this subject that it has generated considerable skepticism about the welfare implications of the development process. Indeed, on some interpretations, developing countries face the grim prospect not just of increasing relative inequality, but also of declining absolute incomes for the lower income groups.