This paper specifies and estimates a four-equation disequilibrium model of the consumption goods market in a centrally planned economy(CPE).The data are from Poland for the period 1955-1980, but the analysis is more general and will be applied to other CPEs as soon as the appropriate data sets...

This paper examines a model in which demand is uncertain and production must occur before demand is known for sure. By investing resources in information gathering activity, demand can be forecast. The paper investigates the relationship between the incentive to plan and market structure and...

We study the impacts of a rural development program designed to boost the income of the smallfarm sector in Nicaragua. Exploiting the random assignment of treatment, we find statistically and economically significant impacts on gross farm income and investment in productive farm capital. Using...

How high can public debt rise without compromising fiscal solvency? We answer this question using a stochastic ability-to-pay model of sovereign default in which risk-neutral investors lend to a government that displays "fiscal fatigue," because its ability to increase primary balances cannot...

We develop a method for identifying and quantifying the fiscal channels that help finance government spending shocks. We define fiscal shocks as surprises in defense spending and show that they are more precisely identified when defense stock data are used in addition to aggregate macroeconomic...

Experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what one would infer from market interest rates and seem unreasonable for economic decision-making. Such high rates have often been attributed to present bias and hyperbolic discounting. A commonly recognized bias of standard...

In this paper, we estimate government purchase multipliers for a large number of OECD countries, allowing these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and using real-time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable components. We adapt our previous...

One possible explanation for the difficulty in controlling the budget is that a major component of spending --tax expenditures--receives privileged status. It is treated as tax cuts rather than spending. This paper explores the implications of that classification and illustrates how it can lead...

We calculate the incidence of recent changes to the New Jersey state tax system on a sample of homeowners. Our analysis distinguishes between business-as-usual responses to an evolving fiscal situation and tax changes that constitute a surprise. The latter have incidence effects; the former do...