We provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. To the best of our knowledge, this well-established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before. Our empirical procedure is summarized as follows. First, we construct a measure of...

We show in this paper that capital controls are aloso a statistically significant explanatory variable of the output-inflation tradoff coefficient, and that they improve the sacrifice ratio. Consequently, capital controls can help explain the relatively small output losses in the recent...

This paper deals with repeated decision problems which are similar to the task of guessing the color outcomes of five independent spinnings of a roulette wheel, 60% of whose slots are covered in red and 40% in white, where each correct guess yields a prize of 1$.

This paper analyzes the implications of a cost of deviating upwards from a public-debt/output guideline, as the 0.6 ratio in the Maastricht Treaty, in the context of a fiscal policymaking model. Given a pre-announced timetable for enforcement, the dynamic paths of the tax rate and government...