Research Papers and Book

The Panic of 2008

• What Caused the Recession of 2008? Evidence from Labor Productivity.
• A Depressing Scenario: Mortgage Debt Becomes Unemployment Insurance.
• Market Responses to the Panic of 2008 (with Luke Threinen).

Government in Theory and Practice

Social Security and Retirement

• Social Security and Democracy (with Ricard Gil and Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Internationally Common Features of Public Old-Age Pensions, and Their Implications for Models of the Public Sector (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Political and Economic Forces Sustaining Social Security (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Labor Market Search and Optimal Retirement Policy (with Joydeep Bhattacharya and Robert R. Reed III).
• Induced Retirement, Social Security, and the Pyramid Mirage.
• Retirement-Inducing Policy Wears Many Disguises (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Can Monopoly Unionism Explain Publicly Induced Retirement?
• Gerontocracy, Retirement, and Social Security (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).

Causes and Consequences of Policy Distortions

• Causes and Consequences of Political Competitiveness (with Kevin Tsui)
• Population and Regulation (with Andrei Shleifer)
• Conscription as Regulation (with Andrei Shleifer)
• Public Policies as Specification Errors
• Political and Economic Perspectives on Taxes' Excess Burdens
• What do Aggregate Consumption Euler Equations Say about the Capital Income Tax Burden?
• Capital Tax Incidence: Fisherian Impressions from the Time Series
• Capital Tax Incidence: First Impressions from the Time Series
• Capital, Interest, and Aggregate Intertemporal Substitution
• A Century of Labor-Leisure Distortions
• A Dual Method of Empirically Evaluating Dynamic Competitive Equilibrium Models with Market Distortions, with Applications to The Great Depression and World War II
• Economic Limits on Rational Democratic Redistribution
• Comment on "Average Marginal Tax Rates Revisited" (with Justin G. Marion).
• Paternalism and Government Intervention - Public Finance in Reverse (with Tomas Philipson).
• The 100% Tax in Theory and Practice.
• Accounting for the Growth of Government (with Gary S. Becker).
• Deadweight Costs and the Size of Government (with Gary S. Becker).

Voting and Public Policy

• Political Entry, Public Policies, and the Economy (with Kevin Tsui)
• Causes and Consequences of Political Competitiveness (with Kevin Tsui)
• Do Democracies Have Different Public Policies than Nondemocracies? (with Ricard Gil and Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Social Security and Democracy (with Ricard Gil and Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Economic Limits on Rational Democratic Redistribution
• The Empirical Frequency of a Pivotal Vote (with Chip Hunter).
• Is Voting Rational or Instrumental? (with Gary S. Becker).

Monetary Policy

• The Optimum Quantity of Money: Theory and Evidence (with Xavier X. Sala-i-Martin).

Intertemporal Choice

• Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality
• Robust Aggregate Implications of Stochastic Discount Factor Volatility
• What do Aggregate Consumption Euler Equations Say about the Capital Income Tax Burden?
• Capital Tax Incidence: Fisherian Impressions from the Time Series
• Economic Interpretations of Intergenerational Correlations (with Nathan Grawe)
• Capital, Interest, and Aggregate Intertemporal Substitution
• Substitution over Time: Another Look at Life Cycle Labor Supply
• A Logical Economist's Argument Against Hyperbolic Discounting
• Human Capital, Heterogeneity, and Estimated Degrees of Intergenerational Mobility (with Song Han).
• Galton vs. the Human Capital Approach to Inheritance: Some Evidence
• The Intertemporal Substitution of Work: What Does the Evidence Say?
• The Endogenous Determination of Time Preference (with Gary S. Becker).

Labor Supply

• Selection, Investment, and Women's Relative Wages over Time (with Yona Rubinstein)
• The Closing Gender Gap as a Roy Model Illusion (with Yona Rubinstein)
• Specialization, Inequality, and the Labor Market for Married Women (with Yona Rubinstein)
• Household vs. Personal Accounts of the Labor Market, 1967-97 (with Yona Rubinstein)
• A Century of Labor-Leisure Distortions
• Aggregate Implications of Indivisible Labor
• Time Use and Population Representation in the Sloan Study of Adolescents
• Substitution over Time: Another Look at Life Cycle Labor Supply
• Microfoundations and Macro Implications of Indivisible Labor
• Work Ethic & Family Background: Some Evidence
• The Intertemporal Substitution of Work: What Does the Evidence Say?
• Pecuniary and Nonpecuniary Incentives to Work in the U.S. during World War II. (Click here for a nice graphic)

Human Capital and Economic Growth

• The Value of Life in General Equilibrium (with Anupam Jena, Tomas J. Philipson, and Eric Sun)
• Selection, Investment, and Women's Relative Wages over Time (with Yona Rubinstein)
• Measuring Aggregate Human Capital (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• A Labor-Income-Based Measure of the Value of Human Capital: An Application to the States of the United States (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Transitional Dynamics in Two-Sector Models of Endogenous Growth (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
• Computing Transitional Dynamics in Recursive Growth Models: The Method of Progressive Paths.
• A Note on the Time Elimination Method for Solving Recursive Growth Models.

Demand for Money, and Financial Markets

• Insurance Market Participation under Symmetric Information (with Tomas Philipson).
• The Optimum Quantity of Money: Theory and Evidence (with Xavier X. Sala-i-Martin).
• Scale Economies, the Value of Time, and the Demand for Money: Longitudinal Evidence from Firms.
• The Demand for Money by Firms: Some Additional Empirical Results.
• A Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of MX Adoption.
• Extensive Margins and the Demand for Money at Low Interest Rates (with Xavier X. Sala-i-Martin).
• A Structural Analysis of Money Demand: Cross-Sectional Evidence from Japan (with Hiroshi Fujiki).
• Production, Financial Sophistication, and the Demand for Money (with Hiroshi Fujiki).
• U.S. Money Demand: Surprising Cross-Sectional Estimates (with Xavier Sala-i-Martin).

Before dismiss any empirical results as "counterintuitive", take a look at Andrew Greeley's "In Defense of Surveys"