Opening up to global trade and investment is often thought to trigger institutional improvement by raising the expected benefits of institutional reform and reducing incumbents' incentives and ability to preserve the status quo. However, recent experience is not entirely consistent with this...

Why do countries delay stabilizations of large and increasing budget deficits and inflation? And what explains the timing of reforms? We use the war of attrition model as a guidance for our empirical study on a vast sample of countries. We find that stabilizations are more likely to occur when...

Recent results in value at risk analysis show that, for extremely heavy-tailed risks with unbounded distribution support, diversification may increase value at risk, and that, generally, it is difficult to construct an appropriate risk measure for such distributions. We further analyze the...

The present paper introduces new sign tests for testing equality of conditional distributions of two (arbitrary) adapted processes as well as for testing conditionally symmetric martingale-difference assumptions. Our analysis is based on results that demonstrate randomization over ties in sign...

We propose that a simple “dual-self” model gives a unified explanation for several empirical regularities, including the apparent time-inconsistency that has motivated models of hyperbolic discounting and Rabin’s paradox of risk aversion in the large and small. The model also implies that...

This paper focuses on the analysis of portfolio diversification for a wide class of nonlinear transformations of heavy-tailed risks. We show that diversification of a portfolio of nonlinear transformations of thick-tailed risks increases riskiness if expectations of these functions are infinite....

This paper discusses five questions the incoming chairman of the Federal Reserve must ponder as he assumes his new post. How important are monetary rules? Should the Fed adopt inflation targeting? Should he be free with his opinions? Should he be a high-profile public figure? Is it more...

A popular way to estimate a Pareto exponent is to run an OLS regression: log (Rank) = c - blog (Size), and take b as an estimate of the Pareto exponent. Unfortunately, this procedure is strongly biased in small samples. We provide a simple practical remedy for this bias, and argue that, if one...

New developments in the world economy have triggered research designed to better understand the changes in trade and investment patterns, and the reorganization of production across national borders. Although traditional trade theory has much to offer in explaining parts of this puzzle, other...

Using the birth certificates data from the Vital Statistics of the USA between 1968 and 1999, we construct state level panel data of different measures of fertility and examine the change in divorce laws. Total fertility declined in states that introduced unilateral divorce, which makes...