Austerity measures in Europe have been the topic of a heated and mostly confused debate in the economic world. During the May summit of the leading industrial nations at Camp David, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders pushed for continued European austerity. Keynesian critics argue that these policies destroy economic growth.

This book by Alan Viard and Robert Carroll proposes to completely replace the income tax system with a progressive consumption tax.

Hires, quits, and layoffs exhibit strong, highly nonlinear relationships to employer growth rates in the cross section. Simple statistical models of these relationships greatly improve our ability to account for fluctuations in aggregate worker flows and enable us to construct synthetic measures of hires, separations, quits, and layoffs back to 1990.

Many commentators argue that uncertainty about taxes, government spending and other policy matters deepened the recession of 2007-2009 and slowed the recovery. To investigate this issue we develop a new index of policy-related economic uncertainty and estimate its dynamic relationship to output, investment and employment.

Sir, Lawrence Summers is certainly correct in asserting that the right focus of the European countries must be on restoring economic growth if they are to restore fiscal sustainability (“Growth not austerity is the best...

A review of developments concerning the use of trading models that have emergedsince the original version of this monograph was published.

On Feb. 15, Leslie Moonves, the brilliant CEO of CBS, gave a piece of good news to investors — there would be an addition to the bottom line in 2012 of about $190 million, thanks to huge spending on political commercials coming into the network and its owned and operated...

The banking industry suffered credit crises in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. An unavoidable conclusion is that its loan loss reserves were in all cases too small.