In Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore has built a case for the epistemic virtues of inclusive deliberative democracy based on the cognitive diversity of the group engaged in making collective decisions. She supports her thesis by appealing to the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem of Lu Hong...

I examine the argument that a low interest rate policy can lead to "overvalued" private assets or privately created bubbles (private bubbles). Using the standard approach to bubbles, I find that a policy of a low real interest rate may support private bubbles but a policy of a low nominal...

Empirical evidence suggests that both leisure time and medical care are important for maintaining health. We develop a general equilibrium macroeconomic model in which taxation is a key determinant of the composition of these two inputs in the endogenous accumulation of health capital. In our...

Financial frictions and financial shocks can affect the trade-off between inflation stabilization and output-gap stabilization faced by a central bank. Financial frictions lead to a greater response in output following any deviation of inflation from target and thus lead to an increase in the...

The "Federalist financial revolution" may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that...

This dissertation contains three essays. In the first essay, we consider nontraded goods as an important impact on bilateral trade flows. A testable gravity equation is derived and a simple example is demonstrated. A sample of 1995 including 118 countries is examined. The results show that...