Research Papers

This paper introduces the Knightian Uncertainty Hypothesis (KUH), a new approach to macroeconomics and finance theory.

Asset markets are indispensable in harnessing society’s diverse views and insights about future business performance. But those views are shaped as much by emotion and crowd mentality as by rational expectations.

Economic distress in rural areas and opioid exposure in cities are key indicators of overdose deaths

For years, governments in India and much of the developing world have followed the advice of a paper arguing that labor regulations actually hurt workers. The problem? The research was wrong.

Starting with the literature on the estimates of the natural rate of interest, this paper critically analyzes the modern practice of identifying the benchmark rate of monetary policy with an equilibrium or neutral interest rate reflecting “fundamental forces” unaffected by monetary factors.

The American economy changed rapidly in the last half-century. The National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) were designed before these changes started. They have stretched to accommodate new and growing service activities, but they are still organized for an industrial economy.

Wishful thinking and tinkering won’t cut it. Nothing short of a mass mobilization for deep de-carbonization across the global economy can avert the looming climate catastrophe.

We need a new system of rules for the digital 21st century that enhances global digital cooperation and welfare. Nothing less than a historic gathering of the world’s key decision makers will get us there.    

Assessing the Peculiarities of Economics from Two Scientometric Perspectives

In this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis.

This paper critically analyzes voting patterns in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in Top Five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments.

This paper concerns itself with the joint effect of implicit subsidies that are built into the US housing-finance system and financial safety net.

This paper adds to the empirical evidence on the extent to which stock-based pay incentivizes and rewards European corporate executives. It shows that the actual realized gains (that is, take-home compensation) from stock-based pay of CEOs in European publicly-listed firms may be underestimated by the use of “estimated fair value” measures. The paper also documents the heterogeneity among countries in terms of the levels and components of CEO take-home pay. We base our work on a sample of 301 large, publicly-traded companies listed in the S&P Europe 350 index from 11 EU countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom for the fiscal year 2015. Through analyzing companies’ annual reports, we have hand-collected data on various elements of compensation of the company’s CEO in 2015, including the gains that executives realize from stock-based pay. We document that on average half of the total compensation of the European CEOs in our sample is stock-based, measured by actual realized gains, with large differences among countries. Although in some European countries the majority of total compensation is stock-based, the proportions are still well below those that prevail in the

“Dualism” in the structure of production across sectors of the US economy, employment by sector, productivity levels and growth, real wages, and intersectoral terms-of trade increased markedly between 1990 and 2016.