Whether they are financial, economic, or psychological, discount rates affect most economic decisions: investment and savings, hirings and firings, defaults and refinancing, financial and economic reforms, learning and experimentation, and any other decision with long-term consequences, such as...

This note determines the precise connection between an agent`s attitude towards income risks and his attitude over risks in the underlying consumption space. Our results follow a general mathematical theory connecting the curvature properties of an objective function with the ray-curvature...

These are additional notes relating to the paper `The Comparative Statics of Constrained Optimization Problems`, which is appearing in Econometrica. It gathers together material present in various earlier versions of the paper, as well as some new material, which are not found in the published...

We identify a natural way of ordering functions, which we call the interval dominance order and develop a theory of monotone comparative statistics based on this order.  This way of ordering functions is weaker than the standard one based on the single crossing property (Milgrom and Shannon,...

We investigate what it means for one act to be more ambiguous than another. The question is evidently analogous to asking what makes one prospect riskier than another, but beliefs are neither objective nor representable by a unique probability. Our starting point is an abstract class of...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence.  One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

This paper provides methods for carrying out likelihood based inference for diffusion driven models, for example discretely observed multivariate diffusions, continuous time stochastic volatility models and counting process models. The diffusions can potentially be non-stationary. Although our...

This paper is concerned with the Bayesian estimation of non-linear stochastic differential equations when only discrete observations are available. The estimation is carried out using a tuned MCMC method, in particular a blocked Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by introducing auxiliary points and...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of stochastic differential equations when only discrete observations are available. It primarily focuses on deriving a closed form solution for the one-step ahead conditional transition density using the Milstein scheme. This higher order Taylor...

We examine whether credit contributes to business cycle fluctuations by dirctly affecting consumption rather than through the new well understood investment channel.