Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980's. We impute the higher unemployment towelfare states ' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times

memory and as a subject of economic research. In part, this is because in the generally inflationary decades after World War II nominal interest rates have stayed comfortably above zero, and therefore central banks have no longer found themselves "pushing on a string." Also, the experience

and materialism, authors tend to speak of consumers as an undifferen-tiated group, acting individually, perhaps, but guided equally by the same consuming desire for goods. Hence, Cushman (1990, p. 600) describes the post-World War II consumer as "yearn[ing] to acquire and consume," Fox and Lears (1983

forcing ( The third process is the surface dimming. The BC absorption of direct solar radiation reduces the solar radiation reaching the surface and leads to dimming Is the planet dimmer now than it was during the early twentieth century? Solar radiometers around the world are indicating that surface

Economic growth within countries varies sharply across decades. This paper examines one explanation for these sustained shifts in growth—changes in the national leader. We use deaths of leaders while in office as a source of exogenous variation in leadership, and ask whether these plausibly exogenous leadership transitions are associated with shifts in country growth rates. We find robust evidence that leaders matter for growth. The results suggest that the effects of individual leaders are strongest in autocratic settings where there are fewer constraints on a leader’s power. Leaders also appear to affect policy outcomes, particularly monetary policy. The results suggest that individual leaders can play crucial roles in shaping the growth of nations. “There is no number two, three, or four... There is only a number one: that’s me and I do not share my decisions.” —Felix Houphouet-Boigny, President of Cote D’Ivoire (1960–1993) I.

The post-World War II period has seen substantial changes in the distribution of GDP per worker around the world. In the upper half of the distribution, a number of countries have exhibited large increases in income relative to the richest countries. In the bottom half, several countries have seen

For postwar U.S. data, this paper uses Bayesian methods to account for the four sources of uncertainty in a random coefficients VAR for inflation, unemployment, and an interest rate. We use the model to assemble evidence about the evolution of measures of the persistence of inflation, prospective long-horizon forecasts (means) of inflation and unemployment, statistics for testing an approximation to the natural unemployment rate hypothesis, and a version of a Taylor rule. We relate these measures to stories that interpret the conquest of U.S. inflation under Volcker and Greenspan as reflecting how the monetary policy authority came to learn an approximate version of the natural unemployment rate hypothesis. We study Taylor’s warning that defects in that approximation may cause the monetary authority to forget the natural rate hypothesis as the persistence of inflation attentuates.

This paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries. The estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to World War II and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown

the everlasting admiration of all decent peoples of the world by the magnificent manner in which you conducted yourselves through those long, dark, trying war years. To one and all, I express sincere wishes for your future happiness, prosperity and well-being, in whatever part of Canada you locate in, from

he world’s economies have become increasingly integrated and increasingly global. Among the most important and often cited features of the rise in globalization is the enormous growth in the export and import shares of GDP since World War II. In the United States, international trade— that is