It has been argued that the Bretton Woods system (of pegged but adjustable exchange rates) set up after World War II was designed specifically to prevent the manipulation of exchange rates in pursuit of national macroeconomic objectives (see R. Cooper) ; so it is perhaps no coincidence that the...

In this paper we solve for the optimal (Stickler) policy in a model of credibility and monetary policy developed by Cuckierman and Meltzer (1986). Unlike the (Nash) solution provided by Cuckierman and Meltzer the dynamic optimisation problem facing the monetary authority in this case is not a...

Most macroeconometric models are built with the objective, wholly or partly, of providing forecasts. The term "forecast" covers three rather distinct types of exercise : (a) genuine "ex-ante" forecasts, in which the model user predicts the actual future development of the economy, and for which...

The interface between economic theory and applied econometrics is often one of uneasy compromise, with the pragmatic justification for many accepted procedures resting on a theoretical base. This paper examines the surprisingly strong arguments that exist in terms of economic theory, for the use...

Menu-pricing schemes in restaurants are often based primarily on markup-over-cost methods. More sophisticated techniques make use of ideas about consumer demand as well as cost. We propose an experiment for determining the effect of price on the quantity demanded of a menu item. We ran the...

Equilibrium search models generalize the one-sided models used earlier by endogenizing the wage offer distribution. Attempts to estimate versions of these equilibrium n search models have been unsuccessful, ironically because the predicted wage distribution did not fit the wage data. In this...

Purchased order flow refers to the practice of dealers or trading locales paying brokers for retail order flow. It is alleged that such agreements are used to 'cream skim' uninformed liquidity trades, leaving the information-based trades to established markets. We develop a test of this...

Optimal control of a linear process with unknown parameters is considered when the horizon is infinite and rewards are discounted. Active learning strategies are considered, i.e., agents consider the information value of possible actions, as well as current reward. Distributional assumptions are...