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A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major effects on macroeconomic quantities but are absent from conventional models. We discuss and compare the us...

suicide is a well-known public health problem in the united states. macroeconomic conditions, among many other factors, because of their impacts on psychological well-being of individuals, are thought to be linked to suicide attempts. however, previous research on the relationship between suicide rates and macroeconomic conditions, especially that of labor market conditions, has resulted into a...

At the risk of some oversimplification, the leading alternatives to the neoclassical / real business cycle model for understanding short run fluctuations are Keynesian models. I phrase this in the plural because there are multiple different versions of the Keynesian model, which differ in terms of how the aggregate supply block of the economy is formulated. Whereas neoclassical models emphasize...

A large market economy has a huge number of degrees of freedom with weak microlevel coordination. The ‘implicit microfoundations’ approach considers this property of micro-level interactions to more strongly determine macro-level outcomes compared to the precise details of individual choice behavior; that is, the ‘particle’ nature of individuals dominates their ‘mechanical’ nature. So rather th...

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impacts of economy-wide microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small-scale businesses. In our analysis, we find that the redistributive impacts of microfinance are stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the aggregate impacts are smaller. Making the typical microfinance program mo...

Although ARCH-related models have proven quite popular in finance, they are less frequently used in macroeconomic applications. In part this may be because macroeconomists are usually more concerned about characterizing the conditional mean rather than the conditional variance of a time series. This paper argues that even if one’s interest is in the conditional mean, correctly modeling the cond...

In principle, anything can serve these functions, and hence anything can serve as money. In fact, in the past, many different things have served as money. For many years commodities have served as money – thinks like cows, cigarettes, and precious metals (e.g. gold and silver). In more recent years, economies have moved towards fiat money. Fiat money are pieces of paper (or electronic entries) ...

Starting in the early 1990s, the New Open Economy Macroeconomics refers to a vast body of literature embracing a new theoretical framework for policy analysis in open economy, with the goal of overcoming the limitations of the Mundell-Fleming model, while preserving the empirical wisdom and policy friendliness of traditional analysis. Building general equilibrium models with imperfect competiti...

Economics, long thought beyond the reach of experimentation, began gradually to yield some of its inaccessible secrets to laboratory and field investigations over the past century. Observation and analyses of laboratory games have led economists to think about markets as social artifacts, whether evolved or designed, to achieve predictable outcomes in specified environments. The value of potent...