The CDC reports that 1.13 million Americans have died of COVID-19 through June of 2023. I use a model of the impact over the past three years of vaccines and private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States to address two questions....

I use a model of private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID pandemic over the past year in the United States to address two questions: What dynamics of infections and deaths should we expect to see from a pandemic? What are our options for mitigating the impact...

To understand how best to combat COVID-19, we must understand how deadly is the disease. There is a substantial debate in the epidemiological lit- erature as to whether the fatality rate is 1% or 0.1% or somewhere in between. In this note, I use an SIR model to examine why it is difficult to...

This note is intended to introduce economists to a simple SIR model of the progression of COVID-19 in the United States over the next 12-18 months. An SIR model is a Markov model of the spread of an epidemic in a population in which the total population is divided into categories of being...

I present a behavioral epidemiological model of the evolution of the COVID epidemic in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past 12 months. The model includes the introduction of a new, more contagious variant in the UK in early fall and the US in mid December. The model is...

We put forward a theory of the optimal capital structure of the firm based on Jensen's (1986) hypothesis that a firm's choice of capital structure is determined by a trade-off between agency costs and monitoring costs. We model this tradeoff dynamically. We assume that early on in the production...

Are deflation and depression empirically linked? No, concludes a broad historical study of inflation and real output growth rates. Deflation and depression do seem to have been linked during the 1930s. But in the rest of the data for 17 countries and more than 100 years, there is virtually no...

How much discretion should the monetary authority have in setting its policy? This question is analyzed in an economy with an agreed-upon social welfare function that depends on the randomly fluctuating state of the economy. The monetary authority has private information about that state. In the...

We exposit the link between money, velocity and prices in an inventory-theoretic model of the demand for money and explore the extent to which such a model can account for the short-run volatility of velocity, the negative correlation of velocity and the ratio of money to consumption, and the...

What quantitative lessons can we learn from models of endogenous technical change through innovative investments by firms for the impact of changes in the economic environment on the dynamics of aggregate productivity in the short, medium, and long run? We present a unifying model that nests a...