The paper distinguishes between rigid price and flexible price versions of the Prescott (1975) “hotels” model. I focus on two dynamic models that allow for storage: The Bental and Eden (1993) model of all year round goods and the more recent Deneckere and Peck (2012) model of seasonal goods....

I use the Baumol-Tobin approach to examine the following propositions: (a) The optimal supply of liquidity requires a government loan program in addition to paying interest on reserves held by banks, (b) The adoption of the optimal policy will crowd out private credit arrangement and will thus...

We provide a new proof of the non-emptiness of approximate cores of games with many players of a finite number of types. Earlier papers in the literature proceed by showing that, for games with many players, equal-treatment cores of their "balanced cover games", which are non-empty, can be...

I use the Prescott (1975) hotels model to explain variations in price dispersion across goods sold by supermarkets in Chicago. I extend the theory to accounts for the monopoly power of chains and for non-shoppers. The main empirical finding is that the effect of demand uncertainty on price...

I use the Baumol-Tobin approach to examine the following propositions: (a) The optimal supply of liquidity requires a government loan program in addition to paying interest on reserves held by banks, (b) The adoption of the optimal policy will crowd out private credit arrangement and will thus...

I use a flexible price version of the Prescott (1975) “hotels” model to study a dynamic model that allows for storage. The formulation follows the standard competitive analysis tradition with a non-standard definition of markets: The set of markets that open depends on the state of demand. I...

This paper studies price setting within a chain of grocery stores, using a scanner database that contains observations of retail prices for 435 products within 75 stores over 121 weeks. We find price dispersion within the chain. Stores differentiate themselves by the prices of relatively few...

The paper assumes a government advantage in collecting income contingent payments and develop a proposal for a government loan program that is an integral part of the tax system. The focus is on administrative costs and the difference between the collection technologies available to the public...

I study the real effects of bubbles in a price-settingenvironment. Bubbles cause price dispersion and overinvestment in assets that are overvalued. And when they pop some goods are not sold and capacity is not fully utilized. I argue that a government monopoly on the creation of bubble assets is...

The paper analyzes the intermediation role of government under the assumption that it has an advantage over the private sector in collecting uncollateralized loan payments. It isshown that a government loan program may improve the welfare of all generations (including the current old generation)...