AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 3, March 2008
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
A country whose autocrat is assassinated is 13 percentage points more likely to move toward democracy in the following year than a country where the assassination attempt on the autocrat failed.
Do assassinations change history? It's a tangled question, given the many political, military, socioeconomic, and other forces at work. But a new study suggests that political assassinations can change the course of individual nations.
"We find that assassinations of...
Article
In 2000, per capita assets in these personal retirement plans for people retiring at age 65 averaged about $29,700. By 2020, they are projected to average nearly three times that amount in year-2000 dollars, and by 2040, $269,000 year-2000 dollars.
In 1980, 92 percent of contributions to retirement saving plans in the United States were directed to traditional employer-controlled defined benefit pension plans. By 2000, 87 percent of such contributions went into to...
Article
Tax changes have very large effects: an exogenous tax increase of 1 percent of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly 2 to 3 percent.
How do changes in the level of taxation affect the level of economic activity? The simple correlation between taxation and economic activity shows that, on average, when economic activity rises more rapidly, tax revenues also are rising more rapidly. But this correlation almost surely does not reflect a positive effect of tax increases on...
Article
I find it difficult to construct scenarios under which globalization would interfere in any substantial way with the ability of domestic monetary policy to maintain control over the dynamics of domestic inflation.
Today there is a growing unease, even among some proponents of globalization, that the increasingly free flow of goods and capital around the globe may be eroding the ability of central banks to accomplish one of their most vital tasks: controlling inflation...
Article
In the days around earnings announcements, stock prices usually rise.
It has long been observed that when firms announce their quarterly earnings, as they are required to do, considerable price volatility and increases in trading volume are evident. In addition, in the days around earnings announcements, stock prices usually rise. In The Earnings Announcement Premium and Trading Volume (NBER Working Paper No.13090 ), Owen Lamont and Andrea Frazzini explore why these...