We consider four models of consumption that differ with respect to efficient risk-sharing and altruism. They range from complete markets with altruism to family risk-sharing. We use a matched sample of parents and independent children available from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to...

This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. We use a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of quality...

In what follows we provide a conceptually correct procedure for determining whether a risky project passes the "potential Pareto improvement" welfare criterion which forms the normative basis of cost-benefit analysis. In this approach the role of secondary markets in providing opportunities for...

A number of empirical studies document that marginal cost shocks are not fully passed through to prices at the firm level and that prices are substantially less volatile than costs. We show that in the relative-deep-habits model of Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe, and Uribe (2006), firm-specific marginal...

What drives countercyclical volatility? A large literature has documented that many economic variables are more disperse in recessions, but this could either occur because shocks get bigger or because firms respond more to shocks which are the same size. Existing evidence that the dispersion of...

Does time-varying business uncertainty/volatility affect the price setting of firms and, if so, in what way? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German ifo Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the extensive margin of the price...

Between 1810 and 1939, real per capita spending on patent medicines grew by a factor of 114; real per capita GDP by a factor of 5. The long-term growth and survival this industry is puzzling when juxtaposed with standard historical accounts, which typically portray patent medicines as quack...

This paper reports estimates for the ex ante tradeoffs for three specific homeland security policies that all address a terrorist attack on commercial aircraft with shoulder mounted missiles. Our analysis focuses on the willingness to pay for anti-missile laser jamming countermeasures mounted on...

This paper studies how prices comove across products, firms and locations to gauge the relative importance of retailer versus manufacturer-level shocks in determining prices. I make use of a large panel data set on prices for a cross-section of retailers in the U.S. I analyze prices at the...

Real-time pricing (RTP) of electricity would improve allocative efficiency and limit wholesalers' market power. Conventional wisdom claims that RTP provides additional environmental benefits. This paper argues that RTP will reduce the variance, both within- and across-days, in the quantity of...