Faced with real and nominal shocks, what should a benevolent central bank do, fix the money growth rate or target the inflation rate? In this paper, we make a first attempt at studying the optimal choice of monetary policy instruments in a micro-founded model of money. Specifically, we produce...

Notwithstanding its impressive contributions to empirical financial economics, there remains a significant gap in the volatility literature, namely its relative neglect of the connection between macroeconomic fundamentals and asset return volatility. We progress by analyzing a broad...

We present a comprehensive macroeconomic model for the U.S. There exist strict long-term relations between real GDP, price inflation, labor force participation, productivity, and unemployment. The evolution of real GDP depends only on exogenous demographic forces. Other macro-variables follow up...

We examine central monetary policy issues as identified in the United States popular press circa 1787. Rather than a study of the functioning of the colonial monetary system, we consider the thinking about the monetary system. Of particular interest is the use of (pseudo) moral arguments for and...

Recent political discussions in Australia have suggested that Pacific Island nations should dollarize to the Australian dollar. This is seen as a way to stabilise the economies of the region, which have been fraught with political and economic uncertainty. Asia is overtaking Australia as a...

Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people's economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the World Values Surveys...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of three different types of education policies: tuition subsidies (broad based, merit based, and flat tuition), grant subsidies (broad based and merit based), and loan limit restrictions. We develop a quantitative theory of college within the context of...

This paper examines Deflationary dynamics in Hong Kong with a linear and a nonlinear neural-network regime-switching (NNRS) model. The NNRS model is superior to the linear model in terms of in-sample specification tests as well as out-of-sample forecasting accuracy. As befitting a small and...

Lengwiler (2005) presents a model of an endowment economy in which economic actors have different degrees of patience. The model implies that the social discount rate declines as the time horizon increases and that the resulting term structure of the interest rate cannot be produced by a...

How effective are G-8 and OECD efforts to combat bribery and corrupt payments when multinational companies bid on concessions in the developing world? Have the rich countries-- and the United States, in particular--done what is necessary to restrain multinational investors from paying off...