When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and great recession, many countries face substantial deficits and growing debts. In the United States, federal government outlays as a ratio to GDP rose substantially from about 19.5 percent before the crisis to over 24 percent after the crisis. In...

This paper studies constrained portfolio problems that may involve constraints on the probability or the expected size of a shortfall of wealth or consumption. Our first contribution is that we solve the problems by dynamic programming, which is in contrast to the existing literature that...

The public debt stock in some economically developed countries continues to increase because of a lack of tax revenues and the concomitant burdens of social security. Many of those countries suffer from lower birth rates and consequently, have fewer children. Child allowances might be an...

In this paper we account for observed management practice in the estimation of aproduction function. In our model management practice is observable and we allow it toaffect output directly (neutral shift) and indirectly by affecting input productivity. Thisformulation gives us a semiparametric...

The paper sets up a two-country asymmetric trade model with heterogeneous firms,search frictions and endogenous labor market institutions. Countries are linked by tradein goods and non-cooperatively set unemployment benefits to maximize national welfare.We show that more open and smaller...