In this paper we ask whether policies targeting a reduction in crime rates through changes in education outcomes can be considered an effective and cost-viable alternative to interventions based on harsher punishment alone. In particular we study the effect of subsidizing high school completion....

The inability of a wide array of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models to generate fluctuations that resemble actual business cycles has lead to the use of habit formation in consumption. For example, habit formation has been shown to help explain the negative response of labour...

This paper studies the effect of imperfect information on aggregate output and price dynamics. I argue that imperfect information can lead monetary shocks to have persistent real effects. In the environment with unobserved aggregate (monetary) and real demand shocks, price-setting agents face...

We examine several named subsets of the wealthiest individuals in the US and the UK that are compiled by Forbes Magazine and Sunday Times. The data support conventional wisdom of a wealth distribution with power law-distributed right tail, and they allow us to calibrate a statistical equilibrium...

We provide sufficient conditions and necessary conditions for stability of an economy under structural mixed recursive least squares/stochastic gradient heterogeneous learning of agents with possibly different degrees of inertia. We have found a unifying condition which is sufficient for...

In this paper we perform an in—depth investigation of relative merits of two adaptive learning algorithms with constant gain, Recursive Least Squares (RLS) and Stochastic Gradient (SG), using the Phelps model of monetary policy as a testing ground. The behavior of the two learning...

We use a continuous-time approximation approach to analyze dynamics of a model where government adaptively learns the Phillips curve while running monetary policy (Phellps problem). This approach is based on approximating the discrete-time dynamics with learning by a limiting continuous-time...

This paper studies the role of credit market development in an economy with credit frictions. I examine how the provision of credit in connection with collateral assets affects economic performance and the business cycle. In the framework of an economy in which credit constraints arise because...

Gali's innovative approach of imposing long-run restrictions on a vector autoregression (VAR) to identify the effects of a technology shock has become widely utilized. In this paper, we investigate its reliability through Monte Carlo simulations of several relatively standard business cycle...

This paper employs a standard new Keynesian model to compute the inflation/output volatility frontier, i.e. the "Taylor curve". The computation is performed both under equilibrium uniqueness and under indeterminacy. While under uniqueness the Taylor curve looks like expected - i.e. a...