macroeconomic policies kept the economy growing, then real wages would continue to increase steadily for workers throughout the wage distribution. The additional resources being devoted to the new antipoverty initiatives would further contribute to poverty reduction, for example, by raising the skills and employment of those who had been left behind by economic growth. Employment and training p...

A prominent policy issue of the 1970s and one that seems certain to dominate the early 1980s is the appropriate response to a prevailing high rate of inflation. The view that there is a long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment, widely accepted at the end of the sixties, is now held by only a small minority of economists. It is still widely believed, however, that there is a short-r...

The implementation results of an algorithm designed to solve semi-in&nite programming problems are reported. Due to its computational intensity, parallelisation is used in two stages of the algorithm—for evaluating the global optimum and for checking the feasibility of constraints. The algorithms are parallelised using MPI—the message passing interface. The algorithms are then applied to engine...

This paper represents a first attempt to study China’s business cycles using a formal analytical framework, namely, a structural VAR model. It is found that: (a) demand shocks were the dominant source of macroeconomic fluctuations, but supply shocks had gained more importance over time; (b) the driving forces of demand shocks were consumption and fixed investment in the first cycle of 1985–90, ...

This paper presents evidence that stringent balanced budget requirements enforced in some U.S. states have exacerbated business cycles in those states. The effect is not apparent directly. However, among states for which fiscal policy may have more macroeconomic consequences (large states), the difference in volatility between states with lenient and strict balanced budget rules is larger (more...

2 The authors make two main arguments in this paper: that behavioral economics rationalizes a wide array of welfare-improving interventions; and that economists should refrain from recommending policies that go beyond benign paternalism because policymakers are subject to the same behavioral biases that afflict individuals or, worse, may be self-interested, not benevolent. I agree that behavior...