We examine whether the Coase conjecture (Coase [1972], Stokey [1981], Bulow [1982], Gul, Sonnenschein and Wilson [1986]) is robust against slight ability of commitment of the monopolist not to sell the durable goods to consumers with a reservation value higher than the marginal production cost....

We study a stylized theory of the volatility reduction in the U.S. after 1984---the Great Moderation---which attributes part of the stabilization to less volatile shocks and another part to more difficult inference on the part of Bayesian households attempting to learn the latent state of the...