Searching for the Smoking Gun: Did Trade Hurt Unskilled Workers?

The cost of business cycles for unskilled workers

This paper reconsiders the cost of business cycles under incomplete markets. Primarily, we focus on the heterogeneity in the cost of business cycles among agents with different skill levels. Unskilled workers are subject to a much larger risk of unemployment during recessions than are skilled workers. Moreover, unskilled workers earn less income, which limits their ability to self-insure. We ex...

The smoking gun of eugenics

The Collapse of International Trade During the 2008-2009 Crisis: In Search of the Smoking Gun

One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. We find that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall economic activity is far larger than in previous downturns. Information on quantities and prices of both domestic absorption an...

The Collapse of International Trade during the 2008–09 Crisis: In Search of the Smoking Gun

One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. The paper finds that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall economic activity is far larger than in previous downturns. Information on quantities and prices of both domestic absor...

Gravity’s Smoking Gun?

We present a new constraint on the biased galaxy formation picture. Gravitational instability theory predicts that the two-point mass density correlation function, ξ(r), has an inflection point at the separation r = ro, corresponding to the boundary between the linear and nonlinear regime of clustering, ξ ≃ 1. We show how this feature can be used to constrain the biasing parameter, b ≡ ξg(r)/ξ(...