The theory of policy credibility has been influential in both the design of monetary policymaking institutions and in the implementation of policy. In particular, the idea that reputation' is important has been widely accepted. However, careful attention to its assumptions and implications of...

This paper demonstrates how a currency board can become vulnerable to a crises in which the policymaker is forced to devalue. The model is built from two blocks: first, incomplete information about the devaluation cost faced by the policymaker; and second, unemployment persistence. Incomplete...

Measures of central banks' independence and central banks' accountability which are based on an interpretation of their statutes provide, in themselves, no guidance for the assessment of legislative proposals. In the effectiveness of monetary policy, the crucial considerations relate to how...

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...

We examine a variety of preference-based definitions of ambiguous events in the context of the smooth ambiguity model.  We first consider the definition proposed in Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005) based on the classic Ellsberg two-urn paradox (Ellsberg (1961)), and show that it...

Criminals who wear gang colors are acting in a surprisingly brazen way which must increase the probability of being caught and punished by the police.  In our model this brazen behavior is a solution to an enforcement problem.  The central idea is that less able criminals see lower gains from...

Are foundations of models of ambiguity-sensitive preferences too flawed to be usefully applied to economic models?  Al-Najjar and Weinstein (2009) say such is indeed the case.  In this paper, first, we point out that many of the key arguments by Al-Najjar and Weinstein do not apply to quite a...

We propose and axiomatize a model of preferences over acts such that the decision maker evaluates acts according to the expectation (over a set of probability measures) of an increasing transformation of an act`s expected utility. This expectation is calculated using a subjective probability...