[...]Our first suggestion is to reduce the fragmentation oftrading in STRIPS by assigning the same CUSIP number to allSTRIPS maturing on a common date—thus making thoseSTRIPS fungible with each other. In addition to enhancing theliquidity of the STRIPS market, this action would ensure...

[...]In this paper, we update this affordability debateusing data from the 1990s. We follow Gyourko and Linneman(1993) in addressing the affordability issue by asking asimple question: Is a home of a given quality from ten ortwenty years ago more or less affordable today to a householdsimilarly...

We consider a general equilibrium model with frictions in credit markets used by households. Inour economy, houses provide housing services to consumers and serve as collateral to lower borrowingcost.We show that this amplifies and propagates the effect of monetary policy shocks on...

The 19th century was a period of great transformations for Italy. Political unification was achieved in 1861 while economic unification was still far off. Ever since, Italian industrialization has been unbalanced, as the pre-existing gap between Northern and Southern economic development has...

This paper develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth and compare them with leading cities in Europe, Japan and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the...

This study analyzes a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities,monopolistic competition and producer currency pricing. A quadratic approximation to the utility ofthe consumers is derived and assumed as the policy objective function of the policymakers.It is shown...

This paper provides a new theory of international capital ows. In a frameworkthat integrates factor-proportions-based trade and nancial capital ows, a novel forceemerges: capital tends to ow towards countries that become more specialized incapital-intensive industries. This `composition' eect...

This paper presents a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with imperfectcompetition and nominal price rigidities in which productivity shocks coexist withmarkup shocks. After analyzing the features of the optimal cooperative solution, we showthat this allocation can be implemented in a...

Recent literature on the design of optimal monetary policy has shown that deviations fromprice stability are small whenever prices are sticky. This paper reconsiders this issue byintroducing capital accumulation in the model. Optimal monetary policy in this setupimplies small deviations from...