We explore the distortions in business cycle models arising from inefficiencies in price setting and in the search process matching firms to unemployed workers, and the implications of these distortions for monetary policy. To this end, we characterize the tax instruments that would implement...

Twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter stood conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business on its head by declaring that well designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of...

The recent literature on cost allocation lacks consensus on what is an appropriate definition of the consistency axiom. We take this as evidence that a careful reexamination is necessary. The starting point of our critique is the widely adopted definition proposed in Moulin and Shenker (1994),...

Fixed-path methods (FPMs) were introduced to manage situations where several individuals jointly operate a single technology (see [4]). In the production context, they consist in allocating marginal increments of output according to a proportions vector which changes along an arbitrary path....

We propose a new nonparametric estimator for the density function of multivariate bounded data. As frequently observed in practice, the variables may be partially bounded (e.g., nonnegative) or completely bounded (e.g., in the unit interval). In addition, the variables may have a point mass. We...

This paper assesses the plausibility of popular models of the monetary transmission mechanism for the G7 countries. For this purpose, flexible structural vector autoregressions are used to relaxe the restrictions behind the traditional identifying schemes of monetary-policy shocks and their...

This paper considers the information systems induced by auditing policies in a principal- agent model with moral hazard. We point out that two such information systems A and B are seldom comparable using the customary mean-preserving spread relation between their respective likelihood ratio...

In this paper we estimate density functions for positive multivariate data. We propose a semiparametric approach. The estimator combines gamma kernels or local linear kernels, also called boundary kernels, for the estimation of the marginal densities with semiparametric copulas to model the...

Risk management is now present in many economic sectors. This paper investigates the role of risk management in creating value for financial institutions by analyzing U.S. property-liability insurers. Property-liability insurers are financial intermediaries whose primary role in the economy is...