Knowledge that Transforms

Workers plan and save for retirement throughout their careers. Individuals must navigate complex financial instruments and understand public and employer-provided retirement plan characteristics. Beginning when a worker is first hired, most employers provide the option to contribute to retirement saving plans. As workers near retirement, they face many choices that have considerable consequences for their retirement income security. At these two important periods, employers can provide timely information assisting workers in making choices that optimize lifetime wellbeing. Our research, conducted in cooperation with several large employers, illustrates the importance of employer-provided education in increasing worker understanding of several retirement-related issues.

Depression is pervasive in the US particularly among women. The costs in terms of direct medical costs and forgone earnings are substantial. This paper investigates an additional cost of depression. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, we use a unique instrument, the attacks of September 11, which have been linked to depression, to identify the effect of depression on risky sexual behaviors. We find that depressed women are more likely to be sexually active, to engage in oral sex and to have sex without a condom, even after controlling for a rich set of covariates.

This paper points to the important role that the elasticity of aggregate capital supply with respect to the net rate of return to capital plays for the efficiency of policymaking in a decentralized economy with mobile capital and spillovers among jurisdictions. In accordance with previous studies, we show that under the assumption of a fixed capital supply (zero capital supply elasticity) the decentralized policy choice is optimal. If the capital supply elasticity is strictly positive, however, capital tax rates are inefficiently low in the decentralized equilibrium.

This paper provides a new theory of international capital flows. In a framework that integrates factor-proportions-based trade and financial capital flows, a novel force emerges: capital tends to flow toward countries that become more specialized in capital-intensive industries. This “composition” effect competes with the standard force that channels capital toward the location where it is scarcer. If the composition effect dominates, capital flows away from the country hit by a positive labor force/productivity shock—a flow “reversal.'' Extended to a quantitative framework, the model generates sizable current account imbalances between developing and developed countries broadly consistent with the data.

Today's global monetary and financial system, to a remarkable extent, continues to rely on the U.S. dollar for international liquidity. This reflects the currency's historic role, the liquidity of American financial markets, and the absence of alternatives. But with the emergence of emerging markets, the capacity of the United States to provide safe assets will be outstripped by the growth of international transactions. It is thus likely that other large economies, presumably Europe and China, will eventually join the United States as sources of international liquidity and that other currencies will come to share the dollar's reserve-currency status.

This paper uses Bayesian methods to estimate the sovereign default probability for Greece and Italy in the post-EMU period. We build a real business cycle model that allows for interactions among fiscal policy instruments, sovereign default risk, and a “fiscal limit,” which measures the maximum level of debt the government is willing to finance. We estimate the full nonlinear model using likelihood inference methods. Although we find that Greece historically had a lower default probability than Italy for a given debt level, our estimates suggest that the Italian government is more willing to service debt than the Greek government.

We measure job-filling rates and recruiting intensity per vacancy at the national and industry levels from January 2001 to September 2011 using data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Industry-level movements in these variables are at odds with implications of the standard matching function in labor search theory but consistent with a generalized function that incorporates an important role for recruiting intensity. Construction makes up less than five percent of employment but accounts for more than 40 percent of the large swings in the job-filling rate during and after the Great Recession.

This paper shows that the collapse of the global market for syndicated loans during financial crises can in part be explained by a flight home effect whereby lenders rebalance their loan portfolios in favor of domestic borrowers. The home bias of lenders' loan origination increases by approximately 20% if the bank's home country experiences a banking crisis. This flight home effect is distinct from flight to quality because borrowers of different quality are equally affected. The results indicate that the home bias in capital allocation tends to increase when adverse economic shocks reduce the wealth of international investors.

Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods—such as land or dispersed spectrum—from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems, traditional solutions, such as the use of coercive government powers of “eminent domain” to expropriate property, can encourage wasteful and unfair assemblies. We discuss the problems holdout creates for the efficient operation of markets and how previous approaches have used regulated coercion to address these challenges. We then investigate when encouraging competition can partially or fully substitute for coercion, focusing particularly on questions of spectrum allocation.

We study a natural experiment in the Indian mutual funds sector that created a 22-month period in which closed-end funds were allowed to charge an arguably shrouded fee, whereas open-end funds were forced to charge entry loads. Forty-five new closed-end funds were started during this period, collecting $7.6 billion US, whereas only two closed-end funds were started in the 66 months prior to this period, collecting $42 billion US, and no closed-end funds were started in the 20 months after this period. We estimate that investors lost and fund firms gained approximately $350 million US due to this shrouding. JEL: D14, G23, G28, O16