That governments should delegate the operation of monetary policy to independent central banks is widely advocated. For a closed economy, the optimal choice results in a banker who is more conservative than the representative government, assigning a lower weight on output in her welfare...

This paper is concerned with two related features of the labor market-the ratio of long-term to total unemployment, R, and the relat ionship between unemployment and vacancies (the "U-V curve"). A model is developed to explain R in terms of the average probability that an unemployed person will...

This paper constructs a dynamic model of the arms trade in which there are a small number of suppliers who care about the profits from the trade and the security consequences of the sale and a large number of interacting buyers who are concerned about their security relative to regional rivals....