Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? We identify four possible reasons: (i) poor countries specialize in more volatile sectors; (ii) poor countries specialize in fewer sectors; (iii) poor countries experience more frequent and more severe aggregate shocks...

Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? We identify four possible reasons: (i) poor countries specialize in more volatile sectors; (ii) poor countries specialize in fewer sectors; (iii) poor countries experience more frequent and more severe aggregate shocks...

An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

Bewley's condition on production sets, imposed to ensure the existence of an equilibrium price density when L? is the commodity space, is weakened to allow applications to continuous-time problems, and especially to peak-load pricing when the users' utility and production function are Mackey...

We give variants on Berge's Maximum Theorem in which the lower and the upper semicontinuities of the preference relation are assumed for two different topologies on the action set, i.e., the set of actions availabe a priori to the decision-maker (e.g. a household with its consumption set). Two...

The paper provides a quantitative analysis of the armed confrontation that took place in Greece between the Communist Party and the Centre-Right Government during 1946-1949. Using monthly data for battle casualties a dynamic Lotka-Volterra framework is estimated, pointing to the existence of a...

The paper provides a quantitative analysis of the armed confrontation that took place in Greece between the Communist Party and the Centre-Right Government during 1946-1949. Using monthly data for battle casualties a dynamic Lotka-Volterra framework is estimated, pointing to the existence of a...

This paper explores the effects of bank credit on firm growth before and after the recent financial crisis, taking into account different structural characteristics of banking sectors and domestic economies. Panel quantile analysis is used on a sample of 2075 euro area firms in 2005-2011. The...

Meltzer (2001b) argues that the current trend for downgrading the role of money in standard macro models is erroneous as it masks those monetary transmission channels which operate through changes in relative yields of assets. This paper shows that the scope of these changes can be empirically...

Governments through the ages have appropriated resources through the monopoly of the ‘coinage’. In modern fiat money economies, the monopoly of the issue of legal tender is generally assigned to an agency of the state, the Central Bank, which may have varying degrees of operational and...