The paper is based on a talk given in April 2010. It traces the roots of the recent financial crisis from development of the limited liability corporation, to separation of ownership from control, tax incentives for debt financing, investment bankers moving to the corporate form, government...

We study quantile regression estimation for dynamic models with partially varying coefficients so that the values of some coefficients may be functions of informative covariates. Estimation of both parametric and nonparametric functional coefficients are proposed. In particular, we propose a...

This paper is concerned with developing a semiparametric panel model to explain the trend in UK temperatures and other weather outcomes over the last century. We work with the monthly averaged maximum and minimum temperatures observed at the twenty six Meteorological Office stations. The data is...

Although theologians and economists communicate their ideas to different professional audiences in different ways, we agree on many basic points. We agree, for instance, that all too often, a large gap appears between "what is" and "what should be." We agree, more specifically, that unregulated...

We review the Stata statistical package and evaluate its suitability for applied research.

This paper provides an economic framework for examining how economic openness affects nationalism. Within a country, a region's level of nationalism varies according to its economic interests in its domestic market relative to its foreign market. A region's nationalism is strongest if the...

This paper provides a direct test of how fixed export costs and productivity jointly determine firm-level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of fixed export costs for each industry-region-year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms...

We study Ramsey-optimal fiscal policy in an economy in which product varieties are the result of forward-looking investment decisions by firms. There are two main results. First, depending on the particular form of variety aggregation in preferences, firms' dividend payments may be either...

I characterize cyclical fluctuations in the cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Using the estimated dispersion, or "risk," stochastic process as an input to a baseline DSGE financial accelerator model, I assess how well the model reproduces...

Pricing-to-market (PTM), the practice of differentiating the price of a good across markets, is commonly attributed to differential distribution and border costs. In this paper we show that some of this price differentiation is sustained by manufacturers selling different versions of an...