The Commission on Graduate Education in Economics had raised several concerns regarding the role of mathematics in graduate training in economics (Krueger, 1991; Colander, 1998, 2005). This paper undertakes a detailed scrutiny of the notion of a utility function to motivate and describe the common...

The paper deals with two specific types of utility functions displaying decision maker's risk aversion at expressing the utility of monetary values. These functions are following: w(c) = 1 – e-x/R, u(x) = ln(x + R), where x is a monetary value and R is a constant expressing the degree of risk...

General financial models have become workhorse models in the fields of macroeconomics and finance. These models have been developed and extensively studied by general equilibrium theorists. What makes them so applicable for macroeconomics and finance is the well accepted fact that models with a...

We quantify the effect of financial leverage on stock return volatility in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with debt and equity claims. The effect of financial leverage is studied both at a market and a firm level where the firm is exposed to both idiosyncratic and market risk. In a...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of racial segregation using a new general equilibrium model that treats neighborhood compositions as endogenous. The model is estimated using unusually detailed restricted Census microdata covering the entire San Francisco Bay Area, and in...

The current obesity crisis in the United States is generating numerous alternative policy options for combating the problem. One alternative that has been widely proposed is an excise or sales tax on sugar-sweetened non-alcoholic beverages. This literature started out within a very simple...

This paper first describes the new literature in environmental economics on the socalled "double dividend" and then explores its implications for a broad range of economic issues. The basic finding in this literature is that in a second-best, general equilibrium setting, environmental measures...

This paper explores the interactions between taxes on work-related traffic congestion and pre-existing distortionary taxes in the labor market. A congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin, when revenues are returned in...

Due to the complexity of general and partialequilibrium models, conventional sensitivity analysis,qualitative reviews or literature-based meta-analyses donot allow for detailed assessments of the role ofindividual parameters and policy shocks across differentmodels. Therefore, the partial...

This paper analyses the impact of quality based labelling on product prices,factor allocation and the resulting effects on producers within the context of aninternational trading system. A general equilibrium model, calibrated to 1998 data,describes United States and European Union labelling...