Unemployment varies substantially over time and across subgroups of the labour market. Worker flows among labour market states act as key determinants of this variation. We examine how the structure of unemployment across groups and its cyclical movements across time are shaped by changes in...

Using an experiment, I compare the use of the `Beer Distribution' classroom game with the more traditional `chalk and talk' approach to teach students about inventories and the macroeconomy. My empirical results confirm and extend our understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the...

A large theoretical literature assumes that experts differ in terms of preferences and the distribution of their private signals, but the empirical literature to date has not separately identified them. This paper proposes a novel way of doing so by relating the probability a member chooses a...

In this paper, we generalize the notion of a communication equilibrium (Forges 1986, Myerson 1986) of a game with incomplete information by introducing two new types of correlation device, namely extended and Bayesian devices. These new devices explicitly model the `thinking process' of the...

We present a novel approach to assessing the attentiveness of professional forecasters to news about the macroeconomy. We find evidence that professional forecasters, taken as a group, do not always update their estimates of the current state of the economy to re‡ect the latest releases of...

Political constitutions frequently separate the roles of proposer and veto player in policy-making processes. A fundamental distinction lies in whether both offices are subject to direct and separate election, or whether the voter instead may directly elect the holder of only one office. In the...

We study a novel mechanism design model in which agents each arrive sequentially and choose one action from a set of actions with unknown rewards. The information revealed by the principal affects the incentives of the agents to explore and generate new information. We characterize the optimal...

Many politicians believe they can intervene in the economy to improve people’s lives. But can they? In a social experiment carried out in the United Kingdom, extensive in-work support was randomly assigned among 16,000 disadvantaged people. We follow a sub-sample of 3,500 single parents for 5...

Conventional economic theory stipulates that output in Cournot competition is too low relative to that which is attained in perfect competition. We revisit this result in a General Cournot-competitive Equilibrium model with two industries that differ only in terms of productivity. We show that...

Not only currencies are assets in investor's portfolio, central banks use them for implementing economic policies. This implies existence of some type of dependence pattern among the currencies. We investigate such patterns among daily Deutsche Mark (DM) (Euro later), UK Sterling (GBP) and the...