Stock-market crashes tend to follow run-ups in prices. These episodes look like bubbles that gradually inflate and then suddenly burst. We show that such bubbles can form in a Zeira-Rob type of model in which demand size is uncertain. Two conditions are sufficient for this to happen: A declining...

This paper explains the differential impacts of trade on countries in terms of institutional differences which result in factor market distortions. We modify the Ricardian, Specific Factor and Hecksher Ohlin models of trade to capture these. Trade has both terms of trade effects and output...

When a takeover is announced, the sum of the stock-market values of the firms involved often falls, and the value of the acquirer almost always does. Does this mean that takeovers do not raise the values of the firms involved? Not necessarily. We set up a model in which the equilibrium number of...

This paper models investment/entry decisions in a competitive industry that is subject to a quantity control on an input for production. The quantity control is implemented by auctioning licenses for the restricted input. The paper shows that liberalizing the quantity control could reduce...

We model Moore's Law as efficiency of computer producers that rises as a by-product of their experience. We find that (1) Because computer prices fall much faster than the prices of electricity-driven and diesel-driven capital ever did, growth in the coming decades should be very fast, and that...

This paper compares the effects of migration restrictions using licenses which are freely traded in a competitive labor market to those that occur when licenses are allocated to firms who are not permitted to trade them. There is reason to expect that a policy of making licenses non-transferable...

Our paper reports the following two findings: 1) In monthly data, bond purchases by the Fed raise bond prices and reduce bond yields. The residual bond-supply to traders is not fully predictable, and this supply-risk adds between 10 and 40 basis points to the standard deviation of the real...

We study 114 years of U.S. stock market data and find That there are large cohort effects in stock prices, effects that we label 'organization capital,' That cohort effects grew at a rate of 1.75% per year, That the debt-equity ratio of all vintages declined, That three big technological waves...