In the context of a human capital based growth model, we show the essential role of labor mobility in equalizing income levels for countries that start off from different initial income positions. Human capital externalities cum labor mobility are the driving forces behind the income level...

Since 1989 twenty five countries in different parts of the world have substantially upgraded the legal independence of their central bank's. This trend is particularly remarkable in view of the fact that during the preceding forty years changes in central bank (CB) legislation were relatively...

the effects of the crime rate on the expected sanction. It turns out that these effects are versatile and rich, both in the direction and the magnitude of their influence on the expected sanction. After analyzing these counter effects of the crime rate on the expected sanction, we present a new...

In a self-confirming equilibrium, each player correctly forecasts the actions that opponents will take along the equilibrium path, but may be mistaken about the way that opponents would respond to deviations. This models a steady state of a learning process in which players observe actions...

A predictor is asked to rank eventualities according to their plausibility, based on past cases. We assume that she can form a ranking given any memory that consists of finitely many past cases. Mild consistency requirements on these rankings imply that they have a numerical representation via a...

We quantity an amount of cross-sectional income and consumption smoothing achieved within subgroups of states, such as regions or clubs, e.g. the club of rich states.