AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 2, June 2003
The Reporter Spring 2003
A free quarterly publication featuring program updates, several summaries of affiliates' research, and news about the NBER
Author(s):
Understanding what monetary policy can do to enhance economic performance (and, just as importantly, what it cannot do) is a continuing challenge for economic policymakers around the world. Researchers in the NBER's Monetary Economics Program contribute to this effort with a combination of theoretical and empirical studies on the effects of central bank actions and the design of monetary policy. These studies are circulated as NBER Working Papers, presented and discussed at...
Article
Author(s):
In an era characterized by increasingly integrated national economies, the exchange rate is the key relative price in open economies. As such, a great deal of attention has been focused on characterizing its behavior. Unfortunately, it is unclear how much success there has been in predicting this critical relative price. As recently remarked, "There may be more forecasting of exchange rates, with less success, than almost any other economic variable."1 While this...
Article
Author(s):
Richer, better-educated people live longer than poorer, less-educated people. According to calculations from the National Longitudinal Mortality Survey which tracks the mortality of people originally interviewed in the CPS and other surveys, people whose family income in 1980 was greater than $50,000, putting them in the top 5 percent of incomes, had a life-expectancy at all ages that was about 25 percent longer than those in the bottom 5 percent, whose family income was...
Article
Author(s):
Introduction
The past twenty years have seen very significant changes in U.S. patent law and policy, strengthening the rights of inventors and significantly expanding those rights across the globe. The United States has broadened areas in which patents can be received, notably software, genetic information, and business methods; has instituted a new unified Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to hear appeals on patent cases from all district courts; and has given...
News
Article
NBER Research Associate N. Gregory Mankiw, Director of the National Bureau's Program of Research on Monetary Economics, has been nominated by President Bush to become Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. His appointment requires Senate confirmation. Mankiw replaces NBER Research Associate R. Glenn Hubbard, who will be returning to Columbia University.
Mankiw is the Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He received his A.B. from Princeton...
Books
Article
Globalization in Historical Perspective
University of Chicago Press,
Order Department,
11030 South Langley Avenue,
Chicago, IL 60628-2215; (800) 621 2736.
Globalization in Historical Perspective, edited by Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, will be available from the University of Chicago Press this spring for $95. This volume collects eleven papers and comments and a panel discussion, and presents a comprehensive view of globalization. The...
Meetings and Conferences, Spring 2003
Meetings
-
ArticleInsurance Project The NBER's Insurance Project, directed by Kenneth A. Froot, NBER and MIT, and Howard Kunreuther, NBER and University of Pennsylvania, met in Cambridge on January 31 and February 1. The following papers were discussed: J. David Cummins, University of Pennsylvania, and Christopher M. Lewis, Fitch Risk Management, "Catastrophic Events, Parameter Uncertainty and the Breakdown of Implicit Long-Term Contracting in the Insurance Market: The Case of...
Conferences
-
ArticleNew Development in Empirical International Trade The 15th annual TRIO conference -- one in a series sponsored by the NBER, CEPR, and TCER to bring together economists from the United States, Europe, and Japan -- on "New Development in Empirical International Trade" took place in Tokyo on December 10 and 11, 2002. This year the Japanese Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry was also a co-sponsor of the event. Kyoji Fukao, Hitotsubashi University; Takeo Hoshi,...