The paper analyzes the financial crisis of through the lens of market failures and regulatory failures. We present a case that there were four primary failures contributing to the crisis: excessive risk-taking in the financial sector due to mispriced government guarantees; regulatory focus on...

In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries make it clear that urbanization and industrialization are strongly associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe a model economy in which...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

We study the problem of an investor that buys an equity stake in an entrepreneurial venture, under the assumption that the former cannot monitor the latter's operations. The dynamics implied by the optimal incentive scheme is rich and quite different from that induced by other models of repeated...

The role of unanticipated changes in money growth for aggregate fluctuations is reexamined using the methods of quantitative equilibrium business cycle theory. A stochastic growth model with money is constructed that has the feature, following Lucas (1972, 1975), that production and trade take...

The financial services industry is „special“ in a variety of ways, including the fiduciary nature of the business, its role at the center of the payments and capital allocation process with all its static and dynamic implications for economic performance, and the systemic nature of problems...

Infrastructure and its effects on economic growth, social welfare, and sustainability receive a great deal of attention today. There is widespread agreement that infrastructure is a key dimension of global development and that its impact reaches deep into the broader economy with important and...

Introduction of the euro certainly represents a sea-change in the environment of modern global finance. In the three decades since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, and against great odds, Europe has forged a platform that could ultimately emerge as a viable challenger to the United...

This study promotes the understanding of the link between development, environment and international economic relations. It suggests that the growth effects of environmental management may tend to serve as an equalizer, helping to redress the imbalance in real income levels between developed and...