The paper argues that economism and, in particular, the individual drive to maximize utility and amass profit are not enough to ensure the efficient functioning of an economy; and that even for elementary economic activities, such as trade, exchange and contracting to occur smoothly, it is...

A Bayesian approach to default rate estimation is proposed and illustrated using a prior distribution assessed from an experienced industry expert. The principle advantage of the Bayesian approach is the potential for coherent incorporation of expert information--crucial when data are scarce or...

Incorporation of expert information in inference or decision settings is often important, especially in cases where data are unavailable, costly or unreliable. One approach is to elicit prior quantiles from an expert and then to fit these to a statistical distribution and proceed according to...

The paper examines the theory of optimal forest management with a view to describing its transition dynamics. In contrast to the literature's emphasis on long-run behavior of optimally managed forests, we focus on the nature of the optimal policy function, which describes the harvesting and...

The paper examines the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams with a social welfare function which respects the Anonymity and Weak Pareto Axioms. It provides a complete characterization of domains (of the one period utilities) on which such an aggregation is possible. A social welfare...

Ramsey equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents and borrowing constraints are shown to yield efficient equilibrium sequences of aggregate capital and consumption. The proof of this result is based on verifying that equilibrium sequences of prices satisfy the Malinvaud criterion for efficiency.

Data dependent bandwidth choices for zero frequency spectral density estimators of a time series are shown to be an important source of nonmonotonic power when testing for a shift in mean. It is shown that if the spectral density is estimated under the null hypothesis of a stable mean using a...

Capital allocation decisions are made on the basis of an assessment of creditworthiness. Default is a rare event for most segments of a bank's portfolio and data information can be minimal. Inference about default rates is essential for efficient capital allocation, for risk management and for...

We study a one-sector stochastic optimal growth model, where the utility function is iso-elastic and the production function is of the Cobb-Douglas form. Production is affected by a multiplicative shock taking one of two values. We provide sufficient conditions on the parameters of the model...