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In this paper we study the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote for the Republican Party by analyzing county-level data on election outcomes between 1990 and 2010. Our main contribution is to separate the effect of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, by exploiting the different geography and timing of the inflows of these two groups of immigrants.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

This paper explores how the Canadian futures market contributed to banks’ systemic risk during the 2008 financial crisis. It finds that core banks as a whole traded against the periphery, in this way increasing their risk of simultaneous losses.

We study how price variation within a store changes with inflation, and whether households exploit these changes to reduce the burden of inflation. We find that price changes from discounts mitigated the inflation burden while cheapflation exacerbated it.

What is the time-varying impact of economic cycles on decisions to invest in human capital?

This overview includes a brief history highlighting the government's use of the primary and secondary markets to develop a framework for distributing its debt securities to financial market intermediaries and end investors. The framework is also intended to meet the government's debt-strategy objectives of raising stable, low-cost funding and maintaining a well-functioning debt market. Pellerin reviews the government's adoption of a new framework in 1998 as well as the 2005 modifications aimed at attracting continued broad and competitive participation in government auctions.

Central banks in many advanced economies enjoy a high degree of independence, which protects monetary policy decisions from political influence. But how should independent central banks react if pressured by fiscal policy-makers? We examine whether a central bank should design a monetary policy framework that prescribes acting conditionally on how fiscal policy behaves.

We estimate a continuous-time model with stochastic volatility and dynamic crash probability for the S&P 500 index and find that market illiquidity dominates other factors in explaining the stock market crash risk. While the crash probability is time-varying, its dynamic depends only weakly on return variance once we include market illiquidity as an economic variable in the model.

Positive commodity price shocks reduce labor income inequality in commodity-exporting economies by compressing the skill premium, as unskilled-labor-intensive sectors such as construction expand faster than skill-intensive services. A multisector small-open-economy model shows how saving or spending commodity windfalls can reinforce or moderate this decline in inequality.