This paper studies optimal monetary and fiscal policies in an economy à la Lucas and Stokey (1983) and Lagos and Wright (2005) with multiple cash and credit goods. We show that optimal policies are in general time inconsistent due to insufficient number of instruments to influence future...

In this paper we test for large deviations in headline measures of the price level relative to core measures using the recently proposed test of Phillips et al. (2011a). We find evidence of explosive behaviour in the headline price index of personal consumption expenditures (PCE) relative to the...

In this paper we explore how the nature of the equilibria changes when the interest income from nominal bond holdings is also taxed in an fully flexible endowment economy. We find that the stability properties of this economy depend on the slope and the intercept of both monetary and fiscal...

The last 25 years have seen the resurgence of a problem of long historical standing: banking crises. While the general presence of a "banking system safety net" has typically prevented these modern crises from turning into the kinds of banking panics observed historically, they are nonetheless...

We show the importance of endogenous oil prices and production in the real business cycle framework. Endogenising these variables improves the model's predictions of business cycle statistics, oil related and non-oil related, relative to a situation where either is exogenous. This result is...

Using a competitive search (price-posting) model, Lester (2011) shows that improving buyers’ price information can counter-intuitively lead to higher prices. We test this result using a lab experiment. Moving from 0 to 1uninformed buyers leads to higher prices in both 2(seller)x2(buyer) and...

We use a human–subjects experiment to investigate how bargaining outcomes are affected by changes in bargainers’disagreement payoffs. Subjects bargain against changing opponents, with an asymmetric disagreement outcome that varies over plays of the game. Both bargaining parties are informed...

We use a laboratory experiment to study bargaining in the presence of random arbitration. Two players make simultaneous demands; if compatible, each receives the amount demanded as in the standard Nash demand game. If bargainers’ demands are incompatible, then rather than bargainers receiving...