Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

It is often asserted that the more substitutable capital and labor are in the aggregate production the more rapidly an economy grows. Recently this has been formally confirmed within the Solow model by Klump and de La Grandville (2000). This paper demonstrates that there exists no such monotonic...

In this paper, we present an overlapping-generations model, where individuals accumulate human capital through formal schooling. We model the role of the public sector in schooling as one of collecting taxes from households and providing inputs to the learning technology. Public expenditures on...

Contrasts are drawn between mainstream macroeconomics (with the 'New Consensus in Macroeconomics' taken as the current manifestation) and heterodox macroeconomics and their abilities to comprehend the financial crises and world wide recession of 2007 – 09 for macroeconomic paradigms is...

A theory of strongly endogenous interactive relationship in participatory development is expounded through the use of a class of models of complementarities between selected variables representing their underlying agencies. Such a model is referred to as circular causation approach and resembles...

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival...

This study employs a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model to analyze the dynamic effects of wage changes on Ghana's economy. In particular, the paper sheds light on how changes in wages affect the short-run and long-run dynamics of labor productivity, employment and prices in the...

A theory of strongly endogenous interactive relationship in participatory development is expounded through the use of a class of models of complementarities between selected variables representing their underlying agencies. Such a model is referred to as circular causation approach and resembles...

This paper analyzes and computes the equilibria of economies with large numbers of heterogeneous agents who have different asset trading technologies, preferences and beliefs. We illustrate the value of our method by using it to evaluate the implications of these heterogeneities through several...

We estimate the effect of the diffusion of photovoltaic (PV) systems on the fraction of votes obtained by the German Green Party. The logistic diffusion of PV systems offers a new identification strategy. We take first differences and instrument adoption rates (i.e. the first difference in the...