This paper studies discounted stochastic games perfect or imperfect public monitoring and the opportunity to conduct voluntary monetary transfers. We show that for all discount factors every public perfect equilibrium payoff can be implemented with a simple class of equilibria that have a...

In recent years many advances have been made in solution techniques for specially structured 0-1 integer programming problems. In contrast, very little progress has been made on solving general (mixed integer) problems. This, of course, is not true when viewed from the theoretical side: Lenstra...

This paper models Continuous Workout Mortgages (CWMs) in an economic environment with refinancings and prepayments by employing a market-observable variable such as the house price index of the pertaining locality. Our main results include: (a) explicit modelling of repayment and interest-only...

This paper motivates and introduces a two-stage method for estimating diffusion processes based on discretely sampled observations. In the first stage we make use of the feasible central limit theory for realized volatility, as recently developed in Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2002), to...

This paper explores the history of inflation-indexed bond markets in the US and the UK. It documents a massive decline in long-term real interest rates from the 1990's until 2008, followed by a sudden spike in these rates during the financial crisis of 2008. Breakeven inflation rates, calculated...

Irving Fisher long advocated inflation indexed bonds. I prove in the context of a multicommodity CAPM world that the best welfare improving bond pays the minimum money needed to achieve the same utility, and not the minimum needed to buy an ideal commodity bundle. Irving Fisher also developed...

Stock market price/earnings ratios should be influenced by demography. Since demography is predictable, stock returns should be as well. We provide a simple stochastic OLG model with a cyclical structure that generates cyclical P/E ratios. We calibrate the model to roughly fit the cyclical...

This paper was begun during a visit at the Cowles Foundation in Fall 2000 and revised during a visit in Fall 2002: Michael Magill and Martine Quinzii are grateful for the stimulating environment and the research support provided by the Cowles Foundation. We are also grateful to Bob Shiller for...

The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then...