In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith (1776) considered the phenomenon of division of labor so enormously significant for the creation of a nation’s wealth that he devoted the first three chapters of his book to an investigation of this process. This is...

Short lived arbitrage opportunities arise when prices adjust with a lag to new information. They are toxic because they expose dealers to the risk of trading at stale quotes. Hence, theory implies that more frequent toxic arbitrage opportunities and a faster arbitrageurs' response to these...

We provide simple examples to illustrate how wealth-driven selection works in asset markets. Our examples deliver both good and bad news. The good news is that if individual assets demands are expressed as a fractions of wealth to be invested in each asset, e.g. because traders maximize an...

This paper is the first application of the singular value decomposition in general equilibrium theory. Every technology matrix can be decomposed into three parts: (1) a definition of composite commodities; (2) a definition of composite factors; and (3) a simple map of composite factor prices...

We study global properties of the equilibrium set of economies with a continuous consumption space. This framework is important in intertemporal allocation problems (continuous or infinite time), financial markets with uncertainty (continuous states of nature) and commodity differentiation. We...

In a complete market for short-lived assets, we investigate long run wealth-driven selection on a general class of investment rules that depend on endogenously determined current and past prices. We find that market instability, leading to asset mis-pricing and informational efficiencies, is a...

Despite the idea of a sustainable/equilibrium number of businesses being at the core of economics, very little empirical analysis has looked at how the adjustment process in disequilibrium works. This paper investigates how business establishment/plant entry and exit are affected by...

U.S. business investment has taken a serious toll during the global financial crisis and also in the recovery phase investment did not pick up as expected. What is surprising is that the alleged investment slowdown happened at a time of record corporate profits and retained earnings, highly...

I use the Prescott (1975) hotels model to explain variations in price dispersion across goods sold by supermarkets in Chicago. I extend the theory to accounts for the monopoly power of chains and for non-shoppers. The main empirical finding is that the effect of demand uncertainty on price...

We investigate how Japanese men aged 60-74 adjust their workforce attachment after beginning to receive a public pension. Men who were employees at age 54 gradually move to part-time work or retire after beginning to receive pension benefits; those who continue working are more likely to be...