If firm sizes have a small dispersion, microeconomic shocks lead to negligible aggregate fluctuations. This has led economists to appeal to macroeconomic (sectoral or aggregate shocks) shocks to explain aggregate fluctuations. However, the empirical distribution of firms is fat-tailed. This...

This paper investigates the ease with which recent immigrants to Australia from different countries and with different visa categories enter employment at an appropriate level to their prior education and experience in the source country. Unlike most of the earlier research in this field that...

Rational beliefs (in the form of WAMS measures) are expectations which though consistent with empirical observations, may deviate from the true underlying probability measure under which data is generated.We provide results on, as well as a decomposition of, WAMS measures and use this to...

This paper provides a general approach in the framework of a complete markets stochastic overlapping generations model to assess whether debt Ponzi schemes are feasible and Pareto-improving. We derive conditions in terms of bond interest rates of different maturities which can be used to assess...

When asset markets are incomplete there are almost always many Pareto improving policy interventions. Remarkably, these interventions do not involve adding any new markets. Focusing on tax policy, I create a framework for proving the existence of Pareto improving taxes, for computing them, and...

Rational beliefs (in the form of WAMS measures) are expectations which though consistent with empirical observations, may deviate from the true underlying probability measure under which data is generated.We provide results on, as well as a decomposition of, WAMS measures and use this to...

Valuation of the benefits from the preservation of water resources is often of interest to policy makers and funding institutions. In developing countries, valuation studies are potentially useful for designing funding policies when inequality is a concern. To fulfil this goal, however,...

This paper formulates a model of dynamic, endogenous reform of political institutions. Specifically, a class of dynamic political games (DPGs) is introduced in which institutional choice is both recursive and instrumental. It is recursive because future political institutions are decided under...

We study a model of civil dispute with delegation in which a plaintiff's lawyer works on a contingent fee basis but a defendant's lawyer on an hourly fee basis. We first derive the conditions under which delegation to the lawyers brings both the plaintiff and defendant more payoffs, compared to...

In its standard “public choice” form, the mechanism-design framework abstracts from institutional and technological constraints beyond those that the modeler can represent in the definition of states, outcomes, and preferences. This abstraction can create a useful simplification. However,...