We examine the behavior of money, inflation, and output under fiat and commodity standards to better understand how changes in monetary policy affect economic activity. Using long‐term historical data for 15 countries, we find that, under fiat standards, the growth rates of various monetary aggregates are more highly correlated with inflation and with each other than under commodity standards. Money growth, inflation, and output growth are also higher. In contrast, we do not find that money growth is more highly correlated with output growth under one standard than under the other.

This paper addresses two long‐standing positive questions in public finance: (i) Why is the property tax, despite widespread popular complaints against its fairness, the almost exclusive tax instrument used by local governments, and (ii) why do we consistently observe higher levels of governments (states) undermining local property tax systems through income tax‐funded grants and state‐imposed caps on local property tax rates? A new intuitive argument to explain question is presented and tested in simulations using a computable general equilibrium model with parameters set to be consistent with New Jersey data. Both the intuitive argument and the simulation results indicate that setting local income tax rates to zero is a dominant strategy for community planners. When faced with popular sentiment against the property tax, community planners can collude and introduce local income taxes simultaneously to prevent adverse general equilibrium migration and price changes. Since zero income tax rates are dominant strategies, however, such an agreement is enforceable only if an outsider such as

Using Current Population Survey data from November 1979 and 1989, I find that Mexican Americans earn low wages primarily because they possess less human capital than other workers, not because they receive smaller labor market rewards for their skills. Among third‐and higher‐generation men in 1989, Mexicans averaged 21 percent lower wages than non‐Hispanic whites, which is roughly similar to the wage deficit for blacks. For Mexicans, more than three‐quarters of the wage gap is attributable to their relative youth, English language deficiencies, and especially their lower educational attainment. By contrast, these variables explain less than a third of the black‐white wage gap.

This paper uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one-dollar reduction in that child's income results in a one-dollar increase in the parents' transfer to the child. The authors find that redistributing one dollar from a recipient child to donor parents leads to less than a thirteen-cent increase in the transfer--far less than the one-dollar increase implied by altruism.