Do international business cycles only represent optimal responses by rational agents to erratic changes in technology, or are they also influenced by factors that are unrelated to fundamentals? This paper addresses this issue by exploring the role of such non-fundamental factors in improving...

For many environmental problems regulators are uncertain about both the costs of abatement and the stock-related damages. For example, governments have imperfect information about damages caused by greenhouse gas stocks, and also about the costs of abating greenhouse gas emissions. They acquire...

We examine the effects of decreasing down payment requirements on consumption volatility within a model which generalizes the standard buffer-stock model of saving to accommodate durables, nondurables and a collateralized liquidity constraint. We consider both a version of the model without...

The rapid growth of a global electronic market place, together with the establishment of standard negotiation protocols, currently leads to the development of multi-agent architectures in which artificial agents can negotiate on behalf of their users. Ideally, these agents should be able to...

Ways of finding a maximum skewness portfolio, with given return, variance and kurtosis, are presented. The methods take advantage of the special shape of the efficient portfolios manifold. Simpler solutions are obtained if the higher moments tensor has some particular structures. The problem of...

This article analyzes the trade-off between ÏcautionÓ and ÏintensityÓ in the use of the control variable in a one-state one-control dynamic stochastic quadratic linear optimization problem with discount factor. It studies the effects that changes in uncertainty of the control parameter have...

The paper presents a method for the recursive solution of models with a continuum of heterogeneous agents. Following Krusell and Smith (1998) and others, it is assumed that the wealth distribution in the economy can be represented, to a sufficient degree of accuracy, by a finite number of...

We discuss two optimization problems from economics. The first is a model of optimal investment and the second is a model of resource management. In both cases the time horizon is infinite and the optimal control variables are continuous. Typically, in these optimal control problems multiple...

We consider optimal fishery management under the assumption of increasing returns that is supported by previous empirical evidence. We improve the tractability and realism of the previous approaches by introducing flow adjustment costs on changes in harvest rate. Our framework is the first to...

We study the technological pre-conditions for competitive equilibrium in a multisectoral economy where"land" is an essential imput. Earlier results by Bidard and Salvadori require either very low interest rates or are unable to predict the type of final demand vectors that can be supported by an...