R E Hall
Biographic Data
| ID | 4463 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R E Hall |
| GIVEN NAMES | R E |
| FAMILY NAME | Hall |
| SIGNATURE | HALL R E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hoover Institution |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6117-6729 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 850 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1964 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Wage Dispersion and Search Behavior
We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job seekers made. We identify the distributions of four key variables: offered wages, offered nonwage job values, job seekers' nonwork alternatives, and job seekers' personal productivities. We find that, conditional on personal productivity, the standard …
Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Milton Friedman's Presidential Address
The centerpiece of Milton Friedman's (1968) presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Washington, DC, on December 29, 1967, was the striking proposition that monetary policy has no longer-run effects on the real economy. Friedman focused on two real measures, the unemployment rate and the real interest rate, but the message was broader-in the longer run, monetary policy controls only the price level. We call this the…
The Anatomy of Stagnation in a Modern Economy
In 2008, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression launched a deep contraction of the US economy. Output fell quickly to a level 10% below trend. Unemployment reached 10% of the labour force. Seven years after the crisis, unemployment was back to normal, but output was 15% below trend. Stagnation had set in. The most important source of the stagnation was a sharp decline in productivity growth. A decline in R&D and other productivity‐…
The High Sensitivity of Economic Activity to Financial Frictions
A financial friction is a wedge between the return received by providers of financial capital – ultimately, consumers – and the cost of capital paid by businesses and consumers who use capital. I study two frictions. One raises the rental cost of capital to firms and the other raises the rental cost of housing and durable goods to consumers. My focus is on the effects of financial frictions – I take the magnitudes of the frictions as given. Thus,…
Homelessness in the 21st Century
Relative to recent immigration trends, Muslim populations in America have emerged as significant among the homeless. Yet the social work manner of attending to homeless Muslim populations has not acknowledged the significance of spirituality proportionate to Muslims in need. Subsequently, homeless shelters must acknowledge the significance of Islamic spirituality vis-à-vis homeless Muslim populations to enable the delivery of services. That consi…
Fiscal stimulus
Why Does the Economy Fall to Pieces after a Financial Crisis
The worst financial crisis in the history of the United States and many other countries started in 1929. The Great Depression followed. The second-worst struck in the fall of 2008 and the Great Recession followed. Commentators have dwelt endlessly on the causes of these and other deep financial collapses. This article pursues modern answers to a different question: why does output and employment collapse after a financial crisis and remain at low…
Reconciling Cyclical Movements in the Marginal Value of Time and the Marginal Product of Labor
Recessions appear to be times when the marginal rate of substitution between goods and workers' time falls below the marginal product of labor. If so, the allocation of workers' time is inefficient. I develop a model of households and production that reconciles cyclical movements in the marginal value of time and the marginal product. The model embodies the findings of research that the Frisch elasticity of labor supply is less than one. It treat…
By How Much Does GDP Rise If the Government Buys More Output
During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0, a range generally supported by research based on vector autoregressions that control for other determinants, but higher values are not ruled out. New Keynesian macroeconomic models y…
The Value of Life and the Rise in Health Spending
Over the past half century, Americans spent a rising share of total economic resources on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result. Debate on health policy often focuses on limiting the growth of health spending. We investigate an issue central to this debate: Is the growth of health spending a rational response to changing economic conditions—notably the growth of income per person? We develop a model based on standard economic …
Employment Efficiency and Sticky Wages
I consider three views of the labor market. In the first, wages are flexible and employment follows the principle of bilateral efficiency. Workers never lose their jobs because of sticky wages. In the second, wages are sticky and inefficient layoffs do occur. In the third, wages are also sticky, but employment governance is efficient. I show that the behavior of flows in the labor market strongly favors the third view. In the modern U.S. economy,…
Controlling the Price Level
Governments determine the size of the unit of value just as they determine the length and weight of physical units of measure. What are the different ways that a government can control the size of the unit of value, that is, control the price level? In general, the government designates a resource-gold, paper currency, another country's currency-and defines its unit of value as a particular amount of that resource. An interesting variant, propose…
Why do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output Per Worker than Others
Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker-we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven …
The Melon and the Dictionary
The Melon and the Dictionary:Reflections on Descartes's Dreams Alan Gabbey and Robert E. Hall The interpretation of dreams is rarely answerable to either evidential or settled theoretical control. When the phantasms of the dreaming mind seem unaccountable, as they often do, they seem to belong to a mental world beyond the reach of historical, philosophical, or scientific analysis, a world for which the rules of methodological engagement seem inap…
Regional Evolutions
macroeconomics, regional evolutions, unemployment, Massachusetts, boom, slump, employment, wages, growth
The Buffer-Stock Theory of Saving
macroeconomics, saving, recovery, recession, consumption, unemployment, forecasting
Convergence Across States and Regions
In this paper we examine the growth and dispersion of personal income in U.S. states and regions since 1880 and relate the patterns for individual states to the behavior of regions.Then we analyze the interplay between net migration and economic growth.We study the evolution of gross state product since 1963 and relate the behavior of aggregate product to productivity in eight major sectors.The overall evidence weighs heavily in favor of converge…
Intertemporal Substitution in Consumption
One of the important determinants of the response of saving and consumption to the real interest rate is the ela sticity of intertemporal substitution. That elasticity can be measure d by the response of the rate of change of consumption to changes in the expected real interest rate. A detailed study of data for the twe ntieth-century United States shows no strong evidence that the elasti city of intertemporal substitution is positive. Earlier fi…
The Relation between Price and Marginal Cost in U.S. Industry
An examination of data on output and labor input reveals that some U.S. industries have marginal cost well below price. The conclusion rests on the finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared with variations in output. In booms, firms produce substantially more output and sell it for a price that exceeds the costs of the added inputs. This paper documents the disparity between price and marginal cost, where marginal cost is…
Making Tax Choices
The Sensitivity of Consumption to Transitory Income
We investigate the stochastic relation between income and consumption (specifically, consumption of food) within a panel of about 2,000 households. Our major findings are: 1. Consumption responds much more strongly to permanent than to transitory movements of income. 2. The response to transitory income is nonetheless clearly positive. 3. A simple test, independent of our model of consumption, rejects a central implication of the pure life cycle-…
The Probability of Dependence on Public Assistance
Despite almost incessant discussion of welfare reform (see Levy, 1978, and Department of Health and Social Security, 1978), traditional systems of income support and their associated problems remain largely intact. The most intractable difficulty has been the conflict between the desire to reduce costs by concentrating benefits on the poorest families, and the desire to preserve work incentives by not withdrawing benefits too rapidly if a recipie…
Labor Market Dynamics and Unemployment
Kim B. Clark, Lawrence H. Summers, Charles C. Holt, Robert E. Hall, Martin Neil Baily, Kim B. Clark, Labor Market Dynamics and Unemployment: A Reconsideration, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1979, No. 1 (1979), pp. 13-72
An Annotated Bibliography of Islamic Science. Volume I . Seyyed Hossein Nasr , William C. Chittick
Stochastic Implications of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income Hypothesis
Optimization of the part of consumers is shown to imply that the marginal utility of consumption evolves according to a random walk with trend. To a reasonable approximation, consumption itself should evolve in the same way. In particular, no variable apart from current consumption should be of any value in predicting future consumption. This implication is tested with time-series data for the postwar United States. It is confirmed for real dispo…
Why do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output Per Worker than Others
Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker-we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven …
Stochastic Implications of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income Hypothesis
Optimization of the part of consumers is shown to imply that the marginal utility of consumption evolves according to a random walk with trend. To a reasonable approximation, consumption itself should evolve in the same way. In particular, no variable apart from current consumption should be of any value in predicting future consumption. This implication is tested with time-series data for the postwar United States. It is confirmed for real dispo…
Intertemporal Substitution in Consumption
One of the important determinants of the response of saving and consumption to the real interest rate is the ela sticity of intertemporal substitution. That elasticity can be measure d by the response of the rate of change of consumption to changes in the expected real interest rate. A detailed study of data for the twe ntieth-century United States shows no strong evidence that the elasti city of intertemporal substitution is positive. Earlier fi…
The Relation between Price and Marginal Cost in U.S. Industry
An examination of data on output and labor input reveals that some U.S. industries have marginal cost well below price. The conclusion rests on the finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared with variations in output. In booms, firms produce substantially more output and sell it for a price that exceeds the costs of the added inputs. This paper documents the disparity between price and marginal cost, where marginal cost is…
By How Much Does GDP Rise If the Government Buys More Output
During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0, a range generally supported by research based on vector autoregressions that control for other determinants, but higher values are not ruled out. New Keynesian macroeconomic models y…
Reconciling Cyclical Movements in the Marginal Value of Time and the Marginal Product of Labor
Recessions appear to be times when the marginal rate of substitution between goods and workers' time falls below the marginal product of labor. If so, the allocation of workers' time is inefficient. I develop a model of households and production that reconciles cyclical movements in the marginal value of time and the marginal product. The model embodies the findings of research that the Frisch elasticity of labor supply is less than one. It treat…
The High Sensitivity of Economic Activity to Financial Frictions
A financial friction is a wedge between the return received by providers of financial capital – ultimately, consumers – and the cost of capital paid by businesses and consumers who use capital. I study two frictions. One raises the rental cost of capital to firms and the other raises the rental cost of housing and durable goods to consumers. My focus is on the effects of financial frictions – I take the magnitudes of the frictions as given. Thus,…
The Specification of Technology with Several Kinds of Output
Econometric models encounter difficulties in handling more than a single kind of output. The absence of data on the flows of intermediate goods makes it impossible to estimate separate production functions for more than one product. Within the unifying framework of the modern theory of cost functions, this paper considers two alternative specifications that can accommodate disaggregation on the output side without requiring data on intermediate g…
Wage Dispersion and Search Behavior
We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job seekers made. We identify the distributions of four key variables: offered wages, offered nonwage job values, job seekers' nonwork alternatives, and job seekers' personal productivities. We find that, conditional on personal productivity, the standard …
Why Does the Economy Fall to Pieces after a Financial Crisis
The worst financial crisis in the history of the United States and many other countries started in 1929. The Great Depression followed. The second-worst struck in the fall of 2008 and the Great Recession followed. Commentators have dwelt endlessly on the causes of these and other deep financial collapses. This article pursues modern answers to a different question: why does output and employment collapse after a financial crisis and remain at low…
Abortion
Abortion: physician and hospital attitudes. R E HallCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.61.3.517 Published Online: August 29, 2011
The Probability of Dependence on Public Assistance
Despite almost incessant discussion of welfare reform (see Levy, 1978, and Department of Health and Social Security, 1978), traditional systems of income support and their associated problems remain largely intact. The most intractable difficulty has been the conflict between the desire to reduce costs by concentrating benefits on the poorest families, and the desire to preserve work incentives by not withdrawing benefits too rapidly if a recipie…
Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Milton Friedman's Presidential Address
The centerpiece of Milton Friedman's (1968) presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Washington, DC, on December 29, 1967, was the striking proposition that monetary policy has no longer-run effects on the real economy. Friedman focused on two real measures, the unemployment rate and the real interest rate, but the message was broader-in the longer run, monetary policy controls only the price level. We call this the…
Fiscal stimulus
Planning and Growth
Journal Article Planning and Growth Get access Planning and Growth. By T. Wilson. (London: Macmillan, 1964. Pp. xii + 210. 30s.) Robert Hall Robert Hall Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 74, Issue 296, 1 December 1964, Pages 987–988, https://doi.org/10.2307/2228856 Published: 01 December 1964
Abortion in American hospitals
Abortion in American hospitals. R E HallCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.57.11.1933 Published Online: August 29, 2011
The Medico‐Legal Aspects of Abortion
Abortion
Abortion: physician and hospital attitudes. R E HallCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.61.3.517 Published Online: August 29, 2011
Abortion in a Changing World
The Effect of Children on the Housewife's Value of Time
The Specification of Technology with Several Kinds of Output
Econometric models encounter difficulties in handling more than a single kind of output. The absence of data on the flows of intermediate goods makes it impossible to estimate separate production functions for more than one product. Within the unifying framework of the modern theory of cost functions, this paper considers two alternative specifications that can accommodate disaggregation on the output side without requiring data on intermediate g…
Schooling, Experience, and Earnings . Jacob Mincer
The Taxation of Earnings Under Public Assistance
An Annotated Bibliography of Islamic Science. Volume I . Seyyed Hossein Nasr , William C. Chittick
Stochastic Implications of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income Hypothesis
Optimization of the part of consumers is shown to imply that the marginal utility of consumption evolves according to a random walk with trend. To a reasonable approximation, consumption itself should evolve in the same way. In particular, no variable apart from current consumption should be of any value in predicting future consumption. This implication is tested with time-series data for the postwar United States. It is confirmed for real dispo…
The Macroeconomic Impact of Changes in Income Taxes in the Short and Medium Runs
The effects of an unexpected change in income taxes are studied in a model with full rational expectations. In the short run, aggregate supply is quite price elastic because commitments to pay predetermined wages are made 1 or more years in advance. The model also recognizes the limited response of investment to unexpected developments in the short run. The paper finds that much of the effect of unexpected tax policy operates through inflationary…
Evaluating the Labor-Market Effects of Social Programs
Labor Market Dynamics and Unemployment
Kim B. Clark, Lawrence H. Summers, Charles C. Holt, Robert E. Hall, Martin Neil Baily, Kim B. Clark, Labor Market Dynamics and Unemployment: A Reconsideration, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1979, No. 1 (1979), pp. 13-72
The Probability of Dependence on Public Assistance
Despite almost incessant discussion of welfare reform (see Levy, 1978, and Department of Health and Social Security, 1978), traditional systems of income support and their associated problems remain largely intact. The most intractable difficulty has been the conflict between the desire to reduce costs by concentrating benefits on the poorest families, and the desire to preserve work incentives by not withdrawing benefits too rapidly if a recipie…
The Sensitivity of Consumption to Transitory Income
We investigate the stochastic relation between income and consumption (specifically, consumption of food) within a panel of about 2,000 households. Our major findings are: 1. Consumption responds much more strongly to permanent than to transitory movements of income. 2. The response to transitory income is nonetheless clearly positive. 3. A simple test, independent of our model of consumption, rejects a central implication of the pure life cycle-…
Making Tax Choices
Intertemporal Substitution in Consumption
One of the important determinants of the response of saving and consumption to the real interest rate is the ela sticity of intertemporal substitution. That elasticity can be measure d by the response of the rate of change of consumption to changes in the expected real interest rate. A detailed study of data for the twe ntieth-century United States shows no strong evidence that the elasti city of intertemporal substitution is positive. Earlier fi…
The Relation between Price and Marginal Cost in U.S. Industry
An examination of data on output and labor input reveals that some U.S. industries have marginal cost well below price. The conclusion rests on the finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared with variations in output. In booms, firms produce substantially more output and sell it for a price that exceeds the costs of the added inputs. This paper documents the disparity between price and marginal cost, where marginal cost is…
Convergence Across States and Regions
In this paper we examine the growth and dispersion of personal income in U.S. states and regions since 1880 and relate the patterns for individual states to the behavior of regions.Then we analyze the interplay between net migration and economic growth.We study the evolution of gross state product since 1963 and relate the behavior of aggregate product to productivity in eight major sectors.The overall evidence weighs heavily in favor of converge…
Regional Evolutions
macroeconomics, regional evolutions, unemployment, Massachusetts, boom, slump, employment, wages, growth
The Buffer-Stock Theory of Saving
macroeconomics, saving, recovery, recession, consumption, unemployment, forecasting
The Melon and the Dictionary
The Melon and the Dictionary:Reflections on Descartes's Dreams Alan Gabbey and Robert E. Hall The interpretation of dreams is rarely answerable to either evidential or settled theoretical control. When the phantasms of the dreaming mind seem unaccountable, as they often do, they seem to belong to a mental world beyond the reach of historical, philosophical, or scientific analysis, a world for which the rules of methodological engagement seem inap…
Why do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output Per Worker than Others
Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker-we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven …
Employment Efficiency and Sticky Wages
I consider three views of the labor market. In the first, wages are flexible and employment follows the principle of bilateral efficiency. Workers never lose their jobs because of sticky wages. In the second, wages are sticky and inefficient layoffs do occur. In the third, wages are also sticky, but employment governance is efficient. I show that the behavior of flows in the labor market strongly favors the third view. In the modern U.S. economy,…
Economics (25 works) · Labour economics (11 works) · Macroeconomics (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (9 works) · Microeconomics (9 works) · Econometrics (7 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (7 works) · Mathematics (7 works)