Data from Okinawa's monetary union with the United States in 1958 and with Japan in 1972 are used to obtain a quantitative indication of how monetary union might affect the behavior of nominal and real shocks across two economies. With monetary union, the variance of the real exchange rate...

We build a model in which financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. Households can invest in financial markets directly if they pay a cost. In equilibrium, the ability of intermediaries to share risk is constrained by the market. From a...

The degree to which explicit inflation targets contribute to the success of price stabilization policies has not been conclusively established. To assess the impact of announced inflation targets on the effectiveness of monetary policy, we construct indicators of inflation pressure that allow us...

This article considers measures of individual welfare change for projects that change the state distribution of prices and incomes. For a consumer whose preferences satisfy the expected utility hypothesis, we investigate whether there is an increasing function of the state-contingent...

This paper examine long-run trends in racial differences in home ownership rate and in the value of owner-occupied housing. In contrast to our previous work, we include female-headed households in the analysis. This extension is important, because female-headed households are less likely to own...

In a classic model of tax competition, we show that the level of public good provision and taxation in a decentralized equilibrium can be efficient or inefficient with either too much, or too little public good provision. The key is whether there exists a unilateral incentive to deviate from the...

A social choice function satisfies the tops-only property if the chosen alternative only depends on each person's report of his most-preferred alternatives on the range of this function. On many domains, strategy-proofness implies the tops-only property, provided that the range of the social...

Using a sample of 26 U.S. economics Ph.D. programs in Fall 2003, we estimate that only about 12 percent of the U.S. and Canadian students accepted for doctoral study did not enroll in any U.S. economics Ph.D. program in Fall 2003 or Fall 2004. It is not possible to increase the supply of new...

Bribery, it has been argued, allocates resources efficiently. We show that this conclusion need not hold in a dynamic extension of a simple static model in which it does. When permits are awarded over time and applicants can reapply, a partially honest bureaucracy results in inefficiency. This...

While financial development and corruption control have been studied extensively, their interaction has not. We develop a simple model in which low corruption and financial development both facilitate the undertaking of productive projects, but act as substitutes in doing so. The...