The “conservative central banker” has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

Why do dynamic inconsistencies in monetary policy exist? In this paper we present a traditional model with output inefficiencies, but we allow for monetary policy to be influenced by the various constituencies in the economy, that pressure the Congress to in turn pressure the central bank to...

Many political scientists and economists have addressed the implications of the public sector??s sheltered status on their unions?? wage strategies vis-??-vis the government. Since the public sector is a monopoly provider of necessary and price inelastic services, conventional wisdom suggests...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the public and the private sector interact in the labor market. Previous studies that analyze the labor market effects of public sector employment and wages have mostly assumed exogenous rules for public wage and public employment....

This paper empirically shows that innovation in Information Technology (IT) has become increasingly dependent on and intertwined with innovation in software. This change in the nature of IT innovation has had differential effects on the performance of the United States and Japan, two of the...

The objective of this paper is to analyze sources of labor productivity growth in the Kansas farm sector over the period 1993-2006 for a sample of 668 farms. The nonparametric production frontier method is used to decompose labor productivity growth into three components: (1) technological...

It is well recognized that the statistical reliability of the conventional method of estimating the effects of technological change on producer welfare is often quite poor. I present a method that enhances the statistical reliability of such estimates. I emphasize that when measuring the welfare...

This dissertation addresses the crucial problem of how environmental policy uncertainty influences investments in energy technological change. The rising level of carbon emissions due to increasing global energy consumption calls for policy shift. In order to stem the negative consequences on...

This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidence on increased skill wage premium and supply of skills in transition economies. It examines whether similar skill–favoring shifts in the Russian and U.S. economies are driven by...

We consider a variety of vintage capital models of a firm?s choice of technology under uncertaintyin the presence of adjustment costs and technology-specific learning. Similar models have beenstudied in a deterministic setting. Part of our objective is to examine the robustness of...