Decision-Making by Children *In this paper, we examine the determinants of decision-making power by children and young adolescents. Moving beyond previous economic models that treat children as goods consumed by adults rather than agents, we develop a noncooperative model of parental control of child behavior and child resistance. Using child reports of decision-making and psychological and cognitive measures from the NLSY79 Child Supplement, we examine the determinants of shared and sole decision-making in seven domains of child activity. We find that the determinants of sole decision-making by the child and shared decision-making with parents are quite distinct: sharing decisions appears to be a form of parental investment in child development rather than a simple stage in the transfer of authority. In addition, we find that indicators of child capability and preferences affect reports of decision-making authority in ways that suggest child demand for autonomy as well as parental discretion in determining these outcomes. JEL Classification:D1, J13

Abstract-Since the term structure of interest rates embodies information about future economic activity, we extract relative Nelson-Siegel (1987) factors from cross-country yield curve differences to proxy expected movements in future exchange rate fundamentals. Using monthly data for the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and the United States, we show that the yield curve factors predict exchange rate movements and explain excess currency returns one month to two years ahead. Our results provide support for the asset pricing formulation of exchange rate determination and offer an intuitive explanation to the uncovered interest parity puzzle by relating currency risk premiums to inflation and business cycle risks.

Abstract-Since the term structure of interest rates embodies information about future economic activity, we extract relative Nelson-Siegel (1987) factors from cross-country yield curve differences to proxy expected movements in future exchange rate fundamentals. Using monthly data for the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and the United States, we show that the yield curve factors predict exchange rate movements and explain excess currency returns one month to two years ahead. Our results provide support for the asset pricing formulation of exchange rate determination and offer an intuitive explanation to the uncovered interest parity puzzle by relating currency risk premiums to inflation and business cycle risks.

Using a network approach, we estimate the output loss due to the lockdown of the Hubei province triggered by the coronavirus disease (COVID‐19). Based on our most conservative estimate, China suffers about 4% loss of output from labor loss, and global output drops by 1% per period due to the economic contraction in China. About 40% of the impact is indirect, coming from spillovers through the supply chain inside and outside China. (JEL E23, E24, F62)

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The origins of the Great Inflation, a central 20th-century U.S. macroeconomic event, remain contested. Prominent explanations are poor inflation forecasts or inaccurate output gap measurement. An alternative view is that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) was unwilling to fight inflation, perhaps due to political pressures. Here, we sort this out via a novel econometric approach, disaggregating the real-time unemployment and inflation time series entering the FOMC historical policy reaction-function into persistence components, using one-sided Fourier filtering; this implicitly estimates the unemployment gap in actual use. We find compelling evidence for (economically interpretable) persistence-dependence in both variables. Furthermore, our results support the “unwilling to fight” view: the FOMC’s unemployment gap responses were essentially unchanged pre- and post-Volcker, while its inflation responses sharpened markedly starting with Volcker.

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