This volume – Predicting Crisis: Five Essays on the Mathematic Prediction of Economic and Social Crises – is the first of three sets of essays. In this first set the economic and social history of the United States is shown to be a “system of movement,” i.e. a logical and mathematic...

In this note, we consider a multisector macroeconomic model under oligopolistic competition. We analyze the effect of an increase of the number of sectors on equilibrium price and on allocations, when the number of oligopolits of each type is constant. We also show that a tax policy has more...

This paper shows that in macroeconomic models of product differentiation that are built on CES utility specifications the widely used assumption of approximating cross price effects to zero, (since Dixit-Stiglitz 1979), plays indeed no crucial role. This is true not only when a large number of...

Notwithstanding its impressive contributions to empirical financial economics, there remains a significant gap in the volatility literature, namely its relative neglect of the connection between macroeconomic fundamentals and asset return volatility. We progress by analyzing a broad...

We examine central monetary policy issues as identified in the United States popular press circa 1787. Rather than a study of the functioning of the colonial monetary system, we consider the thinking about the monetary system. Of particular interest is the use of (pseudo) moral arguments for and...

Recent political discussions in Australia have suggested that Pacific Island nations should dollarize to the Australian dollar. This is seen as a way to stabilise the economies of the region, which have been fraught with political and economic uncertainty. Asia is overtaking Australia as a...

Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people's economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the World Values Surveys...

Lengwiler (2005) presents a model of an endowment economy in which economic actors have different degrees of patience. The model implies that the social discount rate declines as the time horizon increases and that the resulting term structure of the interest rate cannot be produced by a...

How effective are G-8 and OECD efforts to combat bribery and corrupt payments when multinational companies bid on concessions in the developing world? Have the rich countries-- and the United States, in particular--done what is necessary to restrain multinational investors from paying off...

Recent empirical and theoretical literature on the impact of real exchange rate devaluations on economic performance questions the traditional expansionary effect generated within standard Mundell-Fleming models. Contractionary devaluations may arise when firms face maturity or currency...