We explore through both an economics and regulatory lens the frictions associated with credit rating agencies in the aftermath of the financial crisis. While ratings and other public signals are an efficient response to scale economies in information production, these also can discourage...

The nature, and normative properties, of competition in health care markets has long been the subject of much debate. In this paper we consider what the optimal benchmark is in the presence of moral hazard effects on consumption due to health insurance. Intuitively, it seems that imperfect...

The paper seeks to lay out a stock-flow-based theoretical framework that provides a foundation for a general theory of pricing. Contemporary marginalist economics is usually based on the assumption that prices are set in line with the value placed on goods by consumers. It does not take into...

The last few decades have produced many inconsistent estimates of the social costs of payment methods. This paper demonstrates that there is significant disagreement in the theoretical underpinnings of the studies, and that the methodologies used are not robust. Together, these factors make it...

How does public and private information affect equilibrium and welfare in an economy with investment complementarities? And what is the optimal transparency in the information disseminated by economic data or policy announcements? When complementarities are weak so that the equilibrium is always...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...

The advent and spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) increase potential output growth. It is uncertain to what extent and for how long they do so. We use the term "new economy" (NE) to describe the acceleration in potential output growth and the attendant and partly...

I construct a model of money and credit where financial intermediaries write deposit contracts with economic agents to intermediate credit transactions. A preference shock is private information to a depositor, which is costly for intermediaries to observe. Financial intermediaries create...

After describing the essential features of the book market, a welfare analysis of the fixed book price agreement is given. Allowance is made for the opportunity cost of reading. Theoretically, the agreement pushes up book prices and depresses book sales. However, more titles will be published,...

A recent literature has provided empirical evidence that markups are increasing and are heterogeneous across firms. In standard monopolistic competition models, such heterogeneity implies inefficiency even in the presence of free entry. We enrich the standard model of monopolistic competition...