U.S. patent law protects only inventions that are nontrivial advances of the prior art. The legal requirement is called nonobviousness. During the 1980s, the courts relaxed the nonobviousness requirement for all inventions, and a new form of intellectual property, with a weaker nonobviousness...

Vector-autoregression (VAR) forecast models have been developed for many state economies, including the three states in the Third Federal Reserve District--Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. This paper extends that work by developing a Bayesian VAR forecast model for the Philadelphia...

The authors study the asset pricing implications of an economy where solvency constraints are determined to efficiently deter agents from defaulting. The authors present a simple example for which efficient allocations and all equilibrium elements are characterized analytically. The main model...

In a reasonably calibrated Mortensen and Pissarides matching model, shocks to average labor productivity can account for only a small portion of the fluctuations in unemployment and vacancies (Shimer (2005a)). In this paper, the author argues that if vintage specific shocks rather than aggregate...

This paper studies cyclical properties of the private risk premium in a model where a continuum of heterogeneous entrepreneurs are subject to aggregate as well as idiosyncratic risks, both of which are assumed to be highly persistent. The calibrated model matches highly skewed wealth and income...