In The Big Problem of Small Change, Sargent and Velde apply a cash-in-advance model to the history of coinage and to contemporary thought about coinage. They assert that their model accounts for puzzling observations involving the depreciation and disappearance of small coins. I question its...

This paper looks at two features of globalization, namely productivity improvements and falling trade costs, and explores their effect on welfare in a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms and technological asymmetries. Contrary to received wisdom, and for reasons unrelated to...

In this paper we examine and discuss estimates of fertility in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Currently, the United Nations estimates that the country's total fertility rate is 6.7, and national sources provide an even higher estimate of 7.3. However, our assessment of the data...

This paper compares the effects of migration restrictions using licenses which are freely traded in a competitive labor market to those that occur when licenses are allocated to firms who are not permitted to trade them. There is reason to expect that a policy of making licenses non-transferable...

Existence of a monetary steady state is established for a random matching model with divisible goods, indivisible money, and take-it-or-leave-it offers by consumers. There is no restriction on individual money holdings. The background environment is that in papers by Shi and by Trejos and...

Strategy-proofness, requiring that truth-telling is a dominant strategy, is a standard concept in social choice theory. However, the concept of strategy-proofness has serious drawbacks. First, announcing one's true preference may not be a unique dominant strategy, and using the wrong dominant...

The main justification for cash-in-advance (CIA) equilibria when there are multiple assets is a Shapley-Shubik trading-post model where the agents coordinate on a particular medium of exchange. Of course, there are other equilibria. We introduce a refinement and show that the CIA equilibrium...

A state which does not desire an arms race may nevertheless acquire new weapons if it believes another state will acquire them. If each state assigns some arbitrarily small probability to the event that the other state has a dominant strategy to acquire more weapons, then a multiplier effect...

Advertising bans can increase or decrease alcohol consumption due to effects on beverage choice, price competition, and substitution by producers toward nonbanned media. We study bans on broadcast advertising in seventeen OECD countries for the years 1977-95, in relation to per capita alcohol...

This paper examines the role of lumpy consumer durables and market power in generating endogenous cycles which seem to be consistent with the facts. When goods are durable, past consumption choices determine the current market size which consists of consumers who have not purchased the good...