In this paper we revisit the issues addressed in Crucini and Kahn (1996) in the light of recent research on the Great Depression. In that paper we had argued that particular features of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs could have provided them with a stronger impact than conventional wisdom had held,...

We introduce a perfect price discriminating (PPD) mechanism for allocation problems with private information. A PPD mechanism treats a seller, for example, as a perfect price discriminating monopolist who faces a price schedule that does not depend on her report. In any PPD mechanism, every...

Membership and conference attendance trends of regional economics associations are reported and analyzed. Although membership and conference attendance grow steadily at the American Economic Association, both are stagnant for the regional associations. Membership elasticity for economics...

The problem of monetary policy delegation is formulated as a two-stage game between the government and the central bank. In the first stage the government chooses the institutional design of the central bank. Monetary and fiscal policy are implemented in the second stage. When fiscal policy is...

The impact of changing an individual's skill level on the solution to a finite population version of the Mirrlees optimal nonlinear income tax problem with quasilinear-in-leisure preferences is investigated. It is shown that it is possible to sign the directions of change in everyone's optimal...

In this paper we examine the consequences of having a Central Bank whose preferences are state contingent. This has variously been identified in the literature as a Central Bank that is "rationally inattentive", "risk averse", or "constructively ambiguous". The new feature in this paper is that...

Important economic thinkers such as Sen, Arrow and Harsanyi have argued for the existence of multiple preference orderings, allowing individuals to make choices, both when only private welfare is at stake and when the good of some collective is involved. Further, recent literature has shown that...

A method of principal components is employed to investigate nonlinear dynamic factor structure using a large panel data. The evidence suggests the possibility of nonlinearity in the U.S. while it excludes the class of nonlinearity that can generate endogenous fluctuation or chaos.

Recently Chen and Fan (2003a) introduced a new class of semiparametric copula-based multivariate dynamic (SCOMDY) models. A SCOMDY model specifies the conditional mean and the conditional variance of a multivariate time series parametrically (such as VAR, GARCH), but specifies the multivariate...

Various theories make predictions about the relative advantages of individual loans versus joint liability loans. If we imagine that lenders facing moral hazard make relative performance comparisons in determining stringency in repayment, then individual loans should vary positively with...