It is common to think that replacing a judge with a new appointment nearer an ideological extreme will pull outcomes on the court in the ideological direction of the new appointment. This paper argues that this intuition is not always correct, at least for a class of close cases. The model...

We analyze a dynamic multi-pollutant problem where abatement costs of several pollutants are not separable. The pollutants can be either technological substitutes or complements. Environmental damage is induced by the stock of accumulated pollution. We find that optimal emission paths are...

We analyze a dynamic multi-pollutant problem where abatement costs of several pollutants are not separable. The pollutants can be either technological substitutes or complements. Environmental damage is induced by the stock of accumulated pollution. We find that optimal emission paths are...

This paper shows that volatility induces adverse first order welfare effects in countries excluded from the global capital market. This result is illustrated in a model characterized by gains from a greater division of activities, where shocks are persistent. We show that non-linearities...

We describe two examples which illustrate in different ways how money and credit may be useful in the conduct of monetary policy. Our first example shows how monitoring money and credit can help anchor private sector expectations about inflation. Our second example shows that a monetary policy...

We study the impact of climate volatility on economic growth exploiting data on 133 countries between 1960 and 2005. We show that the conditional (ex ante) volatility of annual temperatures increased steadily over time, rendering climate conditions less predictable across countries, with...