In this essay I propose that the adoption of the U.S. dollar as a common currency shortly after the ratification of the Federal Constitution and the accompanying transition from a fiat to specie standard was a pivotal moment in the nation's early history and marked an improvement over the...

Investment of U.S. firms responds asymmetrically to Tobin's Q: Investment of established firms -- `intensive' investment -- reacts negatively to Q whereas investment of new firms -- `extensive' investment -- responds positively and elastically to Q. This asymmetry, we argue, reflects a...

This paper studies price setting within a chain of grocery stores, using a scanner database that contains observations of retail prices for 435 products within 75 stores over 121 weeks. We find price dispersion within the chain. Stores differentiate themselves by the prices of relatively few...

This paper considers the general problem of testing multiple inequality moment restrictions against an unrestricted alternative. We first introduce a test based on a maximum statistic and show how, via a partially recentered bootstrap scheme, we may obtain a testing procedure that delivers, at...

We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a 'second-mover advantage.' In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental-standard levels. We introduce this feature to an...

The paper assumes a government advantage in collecting income contingent payments and develop a proposal for a government loan program that is an integral part of the tax system. The focus is on administrative costs and the difference between the collection technologies available to the public...

Comparative static properties of the solution to an optimal nonlinear income tax problem are provided for a model in which the government both designs a redistributive income tax schedule and provides a public input into a nonlinear production process. These assumptions imply that wage rates are...

A large body of evidence links financial development to economic growth, yet the channels through which inflation affects this relationship and its stability have been less thoroughly explored. We take an econometric and graphical approach to analyzing these channels, and find that higher levels...

Data on U.S. mergers and aquisitions from 1987 to 2006 indicate that firms with high market-to-book values (i.e., Tobin's Q) tend to merge with firms that have lower Q's, but that target Q's are on average higher than those of firms not involved in mergers at all. We capture this fact with a...

Although the finance-growth relationship is now firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, we show that it is not as strong in more recent data as it was in the original studies with data for the period from 1960 to 1989. We consider several explanations. First, we find that the incidence of...