Research Database

This appendix contains eight sections. Section 1 gives technical details of how we calculate standard errors in the CPS data. Section 2 discusses changes in the ACS procedures before 2005. Section 3 examines demographic and economic patterns in migration over the past two decades, in more detail than in the main paper. Section 4 examines the cross-sectional variance of location-occupation interactions in earnings when we define locations by MSAs instead of states. Section 5 describes alternative methods to estimate the variance of location-occupation interactions in income. Section 6 measures the segregation of industries across states and of occupations and industries across MSAs. Section 7 gives technical details on the use of SIPP and census data to calculate repeat and return migration rates. Section 8 discusses transition dynamics in the model.

The key question asked by standard monetary models used for policy analysis is, How do changes in short-term interest rates affect the economy? All of the standard models imply that such changes in interest rates affect the economy by altering the conditional means of the macroeconomic aggregates and have no effect on the conditional variances of these aggregates. We argue that the data on exchange rates imply nearly the opposite: the observation that exchange rates are approximately random walks implies that fluctuations in interest rates are associated with nearly one-for-one changes in conditional variances and nearly no changes in conditional means. In this sense, standard monetary models capture essentially none of what is going on in the data. We thus argue that almost everything we say about monetary policy using these models is wrong.

This study systematically examines the distribution of the wealth of nations and how it has evolved over time. A nation's wealth is measured by its real per-capita gross domestic product. The study documents the following key economic development facts that a theory of economic development must be consistent with: There is a great disparity in wealth between the richest and poorest countries. This disparity has changed little in the postwar period. There was an upward shift in the distribution of the wealth of nations. There has been considerable relative wealth mobility, with some spectacular changes for individual countries in the distribution.

Economic activity in the United States has been growing more slowly than average for the past three years, and it is not likely to speed up soon. The slow growth has been due primarily to pessimism among consumers about their long-run personal income. That pessimism—and its extension to the U.S. economy as a whole—is confirmed by data on real estate prices and labor force participation and by the 1992–93 forecast of a Bayesian vector autoregression model.

Much economic activity takes place within the home. Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the cyclical properties of home production because the available data are too sporadic. Under the assumption that each observation of historical U.S. data on consumption, investment, and hours worked is consistent with optimal behavior on the part of a representative agent, we construct quarterly data on three variables that would otherwise be unobservable at a quarterly frequency: hours worked in the home sector, hours spent in leisure, and the consumption of goods produced in the home sector. Three results emerge: leisure is highly countercyclical while nonmarket hours are acyclical; there has been a large decrease in hours spent in home production since the 1970s; fluctuations in market output are a good measure of fluctuations in individual utility as long as home consumption and market consumption are either extreme complements or extreme substitutes in the production of utility. The sensitivity of results to the parametric assumptions is examined.