This essay draws on the transaction costs model of the firm and an Austrian perspective on the knowledge problem in centrally planned orders to propose an empirically useful Austrian theory of central planning. Afteran initial review of existing theories of the firm, part two develops insights...

Recent changes to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the United States mandate substantial improvement in automobile fuel economy over the next fteen years. One of the ways that manufacturers improve fuel economy is to lower vehicle weights, which has impacts on safety. The...

Formal microfinance institutions have been an important tool in the fight against poverty in developing countries, but their reach is necessarily limited. Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) are an alternative, informal mechanism for saving and borrowing that do not require external...

This paper makes use of long-run restrictions to identify macroeconomic shocks and evaluate their relative importance for exchange rate fluctuations. Unlike previous studies that employ a similar approach, I consider a large eight variable vector autoregressive system that includes short term...

We examine the effects of party platforms on the economic opportunities of firms using a unique data set from a political prediction market in Taiwan, a country with two dominant parties whose political cleavage derives mainly from a single issue: the “One China Principle”. We find that...

Firms must overcome agency and information asymmetry problems to make efficient corporate capital budgeting decisions; this is particularly true for firms with multiple units dispersed across geographic locations. Internal communication and coordination may therefore be crucial in reducing...

There are major differences between ex ante corporate investment plans and ex post investments. The case of China is useful for understanding this problem because there is substantial time series and cross sectional variation in the ratio of utilized to contracted FDI (UC ratio), which is less...

This paper uses a unique new monthly US-UK real exchange rate series for the January 1794 – December 2009 period to reexamine the academic debate over purchasing power parity (PPP). The consensus view described by Rogoff (1996) is that PPP holds in the long-run, but short run deviations are...

This paper examines tipping in the Armstrong (2006) two-sided market model. By adding simple cost asymmetries to the original model, we show that the model is quite robust to dierences in network size and deviations from 50-50 market share. It well represents situations where asymmetries...

Economists’ wariness of data mining may be misplaced, even in cases where economic theory provides a well-specified model for estimation. We discuss how new data mining/ensemble modeling software, for example the program TreeNet, can be used to create predictive models. We then show how for a...