(with an introduction by David Card)
Drawing on the author's work, this lecture presents evidence on U.S. income and wealth inequality. It presents series for top income and wealth shares, and the ...distribution of economic growth by income groups. It discusses the mechanisms behind the evolution of U.S. income and wealth inequality from historical and comparative perspectives. It analyzes the role of public policy and in particular taxation in the evolution of inequality. (JEL D31, F66, J24)
Several key episodes in the 100-year history of the Federal Reserve have been referred to in various contexts with the adjective Great attached to them: the Great Experiment of the Federal Reserve's ...founding, the Great Depression, the Great Inflation and subsequent disinflation, the Great Moderation, and the recent Great Recession. Here, I'll use this sequence of Great episodes to discuss the evolution over the past 100 years of three key aspects of Federal Reserve policymaking: the goals of policy, the policy framework, and accountability and communication. The changes over time in these three areas provide a useful perspective, I believe, on how the role and functioning of the Federal Reserve have changed since its founding in 1913, as well as some lessons for the present and for the future. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This paper surveys the role of the Federal Reserve within the financial regulatory system, with particular attention to the interaction of the Fed's role as both a supervisor and a ...lender-of-last-resort. The institutional design of the Federal Reserve System was aimed at preventing banking panics, primarily due to the permanent presence of the discount window. This new system was successful at preventing a panic in the early 1920s, after which the Fed began to discourage the use of the discount window and intentionally create stigma for window borrowing - policies that contributed to the panics of the Great Depression. The legislation of the New Deal era centralized Fed power in the Board of Governors, and over the next 75 years the Fed expanded its role as a supervisor of the largest banks. Nevertheless, prior to the recent crisis the Fed had large gaps in its authority as a supervisor and as lender of last resort, with the latter role weakened further by stigma. The Fed was unable to prevent the recent crisis, during which its lender of last resort function expanded significantly. As the Fed begins its second century, there are still great challenges to fulfilling its original intention of panic prevention. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Many economists are accustomed to thinking about Federal Reserve policy in terms of the institution's dual mandate, which refers to price stability and high employment, and in which the exchange rate ...and other international variables matter only insofar as they influence inflation and the output gap - which is to say, not very much. In fact, this conventional view is heavily shaped by the distinctive and peculiar circumstances of the last three decades, when the influence of international considerations on Fed policy has been limited. In fact, the Federal Reserve paid significant attention to international considerations in its first two decades, followed by relative inattention to such factors in the two-plus decades that followed, then back to renewed attention to international aspects of monetary policy in the 1960s, before the recent period of benign neglect of the international dimension. I argue that in the next few decades, international aspects are likely to play a larger role in Federal Reserve policy making than at present. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
100 Jahre Federal Reserve System Weber, Christoph S; Wölfel, Katrin
Wirtschaftsdienst (Hamburg),
12/2013, Letnik:
93, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In diesem Jahr feiert der Federal Reserve Act sein 100-jähriges Bestehen. Mit der Zustimmung des Kongresses trat er am 23.12.1913 in Kraft. Damit entstand das Federal Reserve System (Fed), das global ...größte und wichtigste Zentralbanksystem und damit zugleich Vorbild und Anker für andere Zentralbanken. Die Autoren geben eine Übersicht über seine Entstehung und Weiterentwicklung und würdigen seine Rolle kritisch.
The Federal Reserve System (Fed) was created in December 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was signed. Since then, the Fed has become the most influential central bank in the world. This article gives an overview of the Fed's history and its structure before evaluating the Fed's monetary policy over the last 100 years. The main findings are that the last 100 years have shown that a central bank is useful for solving economic problems but that sometimes the central bank has created its own problems.
In September 2012, seven weeks before the presidential election -- one in which top marginal tax rates were a major policy difference between the two major-party candidates -- the Congressional ...Research Service (CRS) published a paper suggesting that there is no empirical evidence that top marginal tax rates impact US economic growth. Republicans claimed that the study was methodologically flawed and asked that the CRS report be pulled. In this article, the authors employ the exact data and specifications from the CRS study but change the methodology to analyze how changes in top marginal tax rates affect growth over the following three to five years rather than just the year of the change. After this modification, the regressions suggest that tax cuts have brought faster economic growth in subsequent years in the postwar US, consistent with the theoretical and empirical literature. Adapted from the source document.
The year 2013 marks the centennial of the first "Free-German Youth Day" that took place on the Meissner massif. Anti-Semitic outbursts erupted at the margins of this historical gathering. In its ...wake, a right-wing populist faction of the youth movement arose for the first time. This collected volume examines the interface between the youth movement, nationalism, and anti-Semitism.
"Im Jahr 2013 jährte sich zum 100. Mal der 'Freideutsche Jugendtag' auf dem Hohen Meißner. Am Rande dieses historischen Treffens, das als erste große Manifestation der 'Deutschen Jugendbewegung' ...gilt, kam es zu antisemitischen Ausfällen. In der Folge entstand erstmals ein 'völkischer Flügel' der Jugendbewegung. Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg gerieten weite Teile der Jugendbewegung, die sich nun als 'Bündische Jugend' begriff, in nationalistisches Fahrwasser und ließen sich für rechtsextreme Politik mobilisieren. 1933 in die Illegalität gezwungen, wandte sich die Mehrheit der seit 1945 wieder- oder neubegründeten Bünde und Verbände zwar der demokratischen Gesellschaft zu, rechtsextreme Jugendgruppen und Publizisten versuchten aber wiederholt, das jugendbewegte Erbe zu vereinnahmen. Der Sammelband wird das Spannungsfeld zwischen Jugendbewegung, Nationalismus und Antisemitismus ausleuchten, wobei erstmals auch jüngere bis jüngste Erscheinungen in den Blick genommen werden." (Verlagsangabe). Inhaltsverzeichnis: Gideon Botsch, Josef Haverkamp: Einleitung (1-8); Uwe Puschner: Völkische Bewegung und Jugendbewegung Eine Problemskizze (9-28); Ulrich Linse: Völkisch-jugendbewegte Siedlungen im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert (29-73); Peter Dudek: 'Mit innerer Wahrhaftigkeit ihr Leben gestalten.' Antisemitismus im Kontext des Freideutschen Jugendtages 1913 (74-92); Ivonne Meybohm: 'Wir leben nicht vom Hass der andern gegen die Juden, sondern von unserer Liebe zum Jüdischen' - Reaktionen der jüdischen Jugendbewegung auf den Antisemitismus im Wandervogel am Beispiel des Wanderbundes Blau-Weiß (1912-1926) (93-109); Stefan Breuer: Der völkische Flügel der Bündischen Jugend (110-133); Antje Harms: Eine 'Gemeinschaft von Volksbrüdern und -schwestern'? Geschlechterverhältnisse, politische Partizipation und nationales Engagement im Jungdeutschen Bund um 1919 (134-151); Jürgen Reulecke: Im Vorfeld der NS-Schulungslager - Männerbundideologie und Männerbunderfahrungen vor 1933 (152-164); Eckard Holler: Linke Strömungen in der freien bürgerlichen Jugendbewegung (165-194); Christian Niemeyer: Jugendbewegung, völkische Bewegung, Sozialpädagogik - Über vergessen gemachte Zusammenhänge am Beispiel der Darstellung der Artamanenbewegung in der Kindt-Edition (195-220); Regina Weber: Wenn Hagen Heimattreu Klein-Heidi zum Tanz auffordert... Erziehung, Familie und Frauenbilder in der Heimattreuen Deutschen Jugend (HDJ) (221-241); Gideon Botsch: 'Nur der Freiheit...'? Jugendbewegung und Nationale Opposition (242-261).
Essay I: This essay provides an overview of the history of the Swedish pension system. Starting with the implementation of the public pension system in 1913, it outlines the key components of each ...major pension reform up until today along with a discussion of the main trade-offs and concerns that policy makers have faced. It also describes the historical background of the four largest occupational pension plans in Sweden and the mutual influence between these plans and the public pension system. Essay II: Despite the fact that the increasing involvement of the private sector in pension provision has brought more flexibility to the pay-out phase of retirement, little is known about the characteristics of those who choose to annuitize their pension wealth and those who do not. I combine unique micro-data from a large Swedish occupational pension plan with rich national administrative data to study the choice between life annuities and fixed-term payouts with a minimum payout length of 5 years for 183,000 retiring white-collar workers. I find that low accumulation of assets is strongly associated with the choice of the 5-year payout. Consistent with individuals selecting payout length based on private information about their mortality prospects, individuals who choose the 5-year payout are in worse health, exhibit higher ex-post mortality rates and have shorter-lived parents than annuitants. Individuals also seem to respond to large, tax-induced changes in annuity prices. Essay III: This essay estimates the causal effect of postponing retirement on a wide range of health outcomes using Swedish administrative data on cause-specific mortality, hospitalizations and drug prescriptions. Exogenous variation in retirement timing comes from a reform which raised the age at which broad categories of Swedish local government workers were entitled to retire with full pension benefits from 63 to 65. The reform caused a remarkable shift in the retirement distribution of the affected workers, increasing the actual retirement age by more than 4.5 months. Instrumental variable estimation results show no effect of postponing retirement on the overall consumption of health care, nor on the risk of dying early. There is evidence, however, of a reduction in diabetes-related hospitalizations and in the consumption of drugs that treat anxiety. Essay IV (with Per Engström): The consumption based method to estimate underreporting among self-employed, introduced by Pissarides and Weber (1989), is one of the workhorses in the empirical literature on tax evasion/avoidance. We show that failure to account for transitory income fluctuations in current income may overestimate the degree of underreporting by around 40 percent. Previous studies typically use instrumental variable methods to address the issue. In contrast, our access to registry based longitudinal income measures allows a direct approach based on more permanent income measures. This also allows us to evaluate the performance of a list of instruments widely used in the previous literature. Our analysis shows that capital income is the most suitable instrument in our application, while education and housing related measures do not seem to satisfy the exclusion restrictions.
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