This study constructs a new data set on unemployment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean and then explores the determinants of unemployment. We compare different countries, finding that unemployment is influenced by the size of the rural population and that the effects of government...

Motivated by recent cartel practices, a stable collusive agreement is characterized when firms' prices and quantities are private information. Conditions are derived whereby an equilibrium exists in which firms truthfully report their sales and then make transfers within the cartel based on...

This paper proposes a new semi-nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation method for estimating production functions. The method extends the literature on structural estimation of production functions, started by the seminal work of Olley and Pakes (1996), by relaxing the scalar-unobservable...

We present proofs, based on the Shapley-Folkman theorem, of the convexity of the range of a strongly continuous, finitely additive measure, as well as that of an atomless, countably additive measure. We also present proofs, based on diagonalization and separation arguments respectively, of the...

A theory of tacit collusion is developed based on coordination through price leadership and less than full mutual understanding of strategies. It is common knowledge that price increases are to be at least matched but who should lead and at what price is not common knowledge. The steady-state...

In the context of an infinitely repeated Prisoners.Dilemma, we explore how cooperation is initiated when players signal and coordinate through their actions. There are two types of players - patient and impatient - and a player's type is private information. An impatient type is incapable of...

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to test (a) whether and to what extent individuals display non-neutral ambiguity attitudes in their choice behavior and (b) if and how do ambiguity attitudes change as a result of interpersonal interactions and persuasion. To address the...

From 2000 to 2003, when Ben Bernanke was a professor and then a Fed Governor, he wrote extensively about monetary policy at the zero bound on interest rates. He advocated aggressive stimulus policies, such as a money-financed tax cut and an inflation target of 3-4%. Yet, since U.S. interest...

We present a comprehensive theory of large non-anonymous games in which agents have a name and a determinate social-type and/or biological trait to resolve the dissonance of a (matching-pennies type) game with an exact pure-strategy Nash equilibrium with finite agents, but without one when...

We explain a puzzle from two recent meta-analyses that cover 25 countries and claim to show that inputs systematically move from higher-value to lower-value activities despite strong aggregate labor productivity growth (ALP). These papers use variants of the Baily, Hulten and Campbell (1992)...