This paper provides a critical review of models of the spread of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that have been influential in recent policy discussions. It notes potentially important features of the real- world environment that the standard models do not incorporate and discusses reasons why...

Using a registered pre-analysis plan, we survey college students during California’s Stay-at-Home order to test whether compliance with social distancing requirements depends on key parameters that affect their marginal benefit from doing so. We find a quarter of students violated the...

The purpose of this research study has been to expand our understanding of the finance-growth ‘nexus’ to finance-growth-inequality ‘nexus’ in the presence of both the formal and the informal sources of borrowing. Using empirical evidence of IHDS Survey data for two rounds the study...

Estimates of the trade elasticity based on actual trade policy changes are scarce, and the few that exist are all over the place. This paper offers a setting where an exogenous increase in a border tax can be used to estimate the trade elasticity. It shows theoretically and empirically that if...

A large literature suggests that the expected equity risk premium is countercyclical. Using a variety of different measures for this risk premium, we document that it also exhibits growth asymmetry, i.e. the risk premium rises sharply in recessions and declines much more gradually during the...

This paper experimentally studies the role of associative memory for belief formation. Real-world information signals are often embedded in memorable contexts. Thus, today's news, and the contexts they are embedded in, may cue the selective retrieval of similar past news and hence contribute to...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional...

This paper provides a detailed assessment of the real-time forecast accuracy of a wide range of vector autoregressive models (VAR) that allow for both structural change and indicators sampled at different frequencies. We extend the literature by evaluating a mixed-frequency time-varying...