Previous research has shown little difference in the average leisure time of men and women.  This finding is a challenge to the second shift argument, which suggests that increases in female labor market hours have not been compensated by equal decreases in household labor.  This paper...

People believe that, even in very large samples, proportions of binary signals might depart significantly from the population mean.  We model this "non-belief in the Law of Large Numbers" by assuming that a person believes that proportions in any given sample might be determined by a rate...

Rational demand for hedging products, where there is a risk of contractual nonperformance, is fundamentally different to that for indemnity insurance.  In particular, optimal demand is zero for infinitely risk averse individuals, and is nonmonotonic in risk aversion, wealth and price.  For...

This paper analyses collusion-proof multilateral insurance contracts between a risk neutral insurer and multiple risk averse agents in an environment of asymmetric costly state verification.  Optimal contracts involve the group of agents pooling uncertainty and the insurer acting as reinsurer...

What is the relationship between entrepreneurial saving practices and reinvestment?  We develop a model of entrepreneurial finance and show that entrepreneurial reinvestment decisions depend on the efficiency of saving practices.  Utilizing a novel micro & small enterprise survey from Tanzania...

Likelihood based estimation of the parameters of state space models can be carried out via a particle filter.  In this paper we show how to make valid inference on such parameters when the model is incorrect.  In particular we develop a simulation strategy for computing sandwich covariance...

Suppose we wish to carry out likelihood based inference but we solely have an unbiased simulation based estimator of the likelihood.  We note that unbiasedness is enough when the estimated likelihood is used inside a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.  This result has recently been introduced in...

This paper asks how well a general equilibrium agency cost model describes the dynamic relationship between credit variables and the business cycle. A Bayesian VAR is used to obtain probability intervals for empirical correlations. The agency cost model is found to predict the leading,...

Time invariance of factor loadings is a standard assumption in the analysis of large factor models.  Yet, this assumption may be restrictive unless parameter shifts are mild (i.e., local to zero).  In this paper we develop a new testing procedure to detect big breaks in these loadings at...