Recent economic growth theory has suggested that wealth differences across nations must be due, at least in part, to the failure in many places to adopt existing production techniques. There are many potential reasons for the failure to adopt existing technology, including the political clout of...

The paper presents a three period model that studies the eects of IMF loans on borrowers’ and lenders’ welfare highlighting the fact that the IMF has both de jure and de facto seniority rights over private creditors. It is shown that an IMF intervention affects borrowers and...

This paper carries out a comparative analysis of the inflation effects on relative price variability (RPV) in two economies with a inflationary experiences clearly different: Argentina and Spain. The results indicate non-neutrality of inflation, particularly in extreme inflation. The main...

The effects of inflation on real wage dispersion and welfare are studied in a cash-in-advance economy with a Walrasian goods market but a labor market with search friction. In the labor market, firms post wages and both employed and unemployed workers search among the posted wages. In...

We propose a new model for the variance between multiple time series, the Regime Switching Dynamic Correlation. We decompose the covariances into correlations and standard deviations and the correlation matrix follow a regime switching model; it is constant within a regime but different across...

Bootstrap aggregating or Bagging, introduced by Breiman (1996a), has been proved to be effective to improve on unstable forecast. Theoretical and empirical works using classification, regression trees, variable selection in linear and non-linear regression have shown that bagging can generate...

While home ownershipt provides a great deal of personal and social benefits, it poses a substantial constraint on individuals' asset allocation.

Decision theorists claim that an ordinal measure of risk may be sufficient for an agent to make a rational choice under uncertainty. We propose a measure of financial risk, namely the Varying Cross-sectional Risk (VCR), that is based on a ranking of returns. VCR is defined as the probability of...

Using a generalized cross-spectral approach, we propose a model-free omnibus statistical procedure to check whether the direction of changes in an economic variable is predictable using the history of its past changes. A class of separate inference procedures are also given to gauge possible...

Conventional time series analysis, focusing exclusively on a time series at a given scale, lacks the ability to explain the nature of the data generating process. A process equation that successfully explains daily price changes, for example, is unable to characterize the nature of hourly price...