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  Working Paper No. 437

  Enhancing Livelihood Security through the National Employment Guarantee Act

  The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 is a major development in the history of poverty reduction strategies and rural development policies in India. Though the successful passage of the Act is due to the long struggle by NGOs, academics, and some policymakers, its successful implementation is a much bigger challenge. Effective implementation of […]
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  Working Paper No. 436

  Importing Equality or Exporting Jobs?

  This study investigates the impact of increased import competition on gender wage and employment differentials in American manufacturing over the period from 1976 to 1993. Increased import competition is expected to decrease the relative demand for workers in low-wage production occupations and the relative demand for women workers, given the high female share in these […]
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  Working Paper No. 435

  Speculation, Liquidity Preference, and Monetary Circulation

  The sharp exchanges that Keynes had with some of his critics on the loanable funds theory made it harder to appreciate the degree to which his thought was continuous with the tradition of monetary analysis that emanates from Wicksell, of which Keynes’s A Treatise on Money was a part. In the aftermath of the General […]
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  Working Paper No. 434

  Time to Eat

  Eating requires the raw food materials that make up meals and also the time devoted to buying food, preparing meals and eating them, and cleaning up afterwards. Using time-diary and expenditure data for the United States for 1985 and 2003, I examine how income and time prices affect both time and goods input into this […]
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  Press Release

  Economic Forecasts from Congressional Budget Office Depend on Unsustainable Private Sector Borrowing

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  Strategic Analysis

  Are Housing Prices, Household Debt, and Growth Sustainable?

  Rising home prices and low interest rates have fueled the recent surge in mortgage borrowing and enabled consumers to spend at high rates relative to their income. Low interest rates have counterbalanced the growth in debt and acted to dampen the growth in household debt-service burdens. As past Levy Institute Strategic Analyses have pointed out, […]
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  Public Policy Brief Highlight No. 83

  Reforming Deposit Insurance

  The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) currently insures bank deposit balances up to $100,000. According to some observers, statutory protection creates moral hazard problems for insurers because it allows banks to engage in risky activities. As an example, moral hazard was a key contributor to huge losses suffered when thrift institutions failed during the 1980s. […]
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  Working Paper No. 433

  All Types of Inequality Are Not Created Equal

  Evidence of an increase in various forms of inequality since the 1970s has motivated research on its relationship to growth and development. The findings of that research are contradictory and inconclusive. One source of these divergent results is that researchers rely on different group measures of inequality. Inequality by gender, household, class, and ethnicity may […]
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  Working Paper No. 432

  Job-Hopping in Silicon Valley

  Observers of Silicon Valley’s computer cluster report that employees move rapidly between competing firms, but evidence supporting this claim is scarce. Job-hopping is important in computer clusters because it facilitates the reallocation of talent and resources toward firms with superior innovations. Using new data on labor mobility, we find higher rates of job-hopping for college-educated […]
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  Book Series

  Italians Then, Mexicans Now

  According to the American dream, hard work and a good education can lift people from poverty to success in the “land of opportunity.” The unskilled immigrants who came to the United States from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries largely realized that vision. Within a few generations, their […]
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  Working Paper No. 431

  Monetary Policy Strategies of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of the US

  In the debate on monetary policy strategies on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost a commonplace to contrast the Fed and the ECB by pointing out the former’s flexibility and capacity to adjust rigidity, and the latter’s extreme caution and its obsession with low inflation. In looking at the foundations of the […]
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  Working Paper No. 430

  Are Long-run Price Stability and Short-run Output Stabilization All That Monetary Policy Can Aim For?

  A central tenet of the so-called "new consensus" view in macroeconomics is that there is no long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. The main policy implication of this principle is that all monetary policy can aim for is (modest) short-run output stabilization and long-run price stability—i.e., monetary policy is neutral with respect to output and […]