Nonbinding communication, or cheap talk, has been associated with the resolution of coordination failures and social dilemmas in both laboratory and field experiments (see Cooper, et al., 1992, and Clark, Kay, and Sefton, 2000; Isaac and Walker, 1991; Ostrom and Walker, 1991; Ostrom, Gardner and Walker, 1994;...

This paper seeks to understand the evolution of the cyclical behavior of U.S. real wage rates from the interwar period to the post World War II period using a dynamic general equilibrium model that emphasizes demand-driven business cycle fluctuations. In the model, changes in the cyclical...

This study examines the causal effects of alternative forms of foreign technology transfer on the productivity of Turkish manufacturing plants through exporting, foreign direct investment and importing. We use propensity score matching techniques that limit implicit assumptions about plant...

We generate a time-series of relative preferences of policy makers for inflation stability using a sample of 24 countries in order to study the behavior of political parties. Such behavior is essential in both the partisan cycle models and the opportunistic political cycle analysis. Our evidence...

We show how a one-period aggregate demand - aggregate supply (AD-AS) model yields equivalent expressions for inflation and output under optimal monetary policy as a forward-looking New Keynesian model. Furthermore, we analyze the advantage the AD-AS model has over the New Keynesian specification...

Sensitivity to scope has become an acid test for the validity of responses to non-market valuation scenarios. We examine the theoretical relationship between whether a subject's responses exhibit sensitivity to scope and whether consistent preferences underlie those responses. We find that...

Soft drink consumption has been hypothesized as one of the major factors in the growing rates of obesity in the US. Nearly two-thirds of all states currently tax soft drinks using excise taxes, sales taxes, or special exemptions to food exemptions from sales taxes to reduce consumption of this...

We use U.S. county data (3,058 observations) and 41 conditioning variables to study growth and convergence. Using OLS and 3SLS-IV we report on the full sample and metro, non-metro, and 5 regional samples: 1) OLS yields convergence rates around 2 percent; 3SLS yields 6-8 percent; 2) Convergence...

This paper contributes to the current literature on market disciplining of the sovereign governments in two ways: Firstly, it distinguishes both sides of the market discipline hypothesis (MDH) by adopting 3SLS to incorporate the contemporaneous feedback effects between primary structural budget...

Analyzing a large weekly retail transaction price dataset, we uncover a surprising regularity small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases for price changes of up to about 10 cents, while there is no such asymmetry for larger price changes. The asymmetry holds for the...