The impact of changes in real interest rates on saving and growth is a central issue in development economics. According to one familiar view, a financial liberalization program which increases real interest rates should encourage saving, thereby boosting investment and growth. While such...

To understand how best to combat COVID-19, we must understand how deadly is the disease. There is a substantial debate in the epidemiological lit- erature as to whether the fatality rate is 1% or 0.1% or somewhere in between. In this note, I use an SIR model to examine why it is difficult to...

This note is intended to introduce economists to a simple SIR model of the progression of COVID-19 in the United States over the next 12-18 months. An SIR model is a Markov model of the spread of an epidemic in a population in which the total population is divided into categories of being...

I present a behavioral epidemiological model of the evolution of the COVID epidemic in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past 12 months. The model includes the introduction of a new, more contagious variant in the UK in early fall and the US in mid December. The model is...

I use a model of private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID pandemic over the past year in the United States to address two questions: What dynamics of infections and deaths should we expect to see from a pandemic? What are our options for mitigating the impact...

This paper presents empirical evidence concerning effects of cultural differences on parents' attitudes toward children from unique U.S. and Japanese survey data. These data sets have been collected by Osaka University, and contain questions concerning worldviews and religions, hypothetical...