Using 114 years of U.S. stock market data we try to relate movements in stock prices to changes in technology. We find measures of technological progress explain 37% of the 3.9% annual growth in the stock market over the 1885-1998 period, the "Jazz-Age" (1918-1934) entrants were not overvalued,...

This paper analyzes a simple and tractable model of occupational choice in the presence of credit market imperfections. We examine the relative roles of parameters governing technology and transaction costs, and history in terms of the initial wealth distribution in determinig the long term...

Sellers in eBay auctions have the opportunity to choose both a public minimum bid amount and a secret reserve price. We ask, empirically, whether the seller is made better or worse off by setting a secret reserve above a low minimum bid, versus the option of making the reserve public by using it...

We examine the impact of a desire for social approval on education and occupation choice and model the endogenous determination of perceptions that influence such approval. In a two-sector overlapping generations framework, agents born with ability endowments in both occupations must choose one...

This paper begins by documenting racial convergence in the value of owner-occupied housing from 1940 to 1990. Most of this convergence occurred before 1970, as black and white home owners became more similar in terms of household and housing characteristics that were positively correlated with...

In this article, benchmark Taylor rules are obtained as the solution to a dynamic programming problem in which interest rates are chosen to minimize the discounted sum of observed inflation and output variations. The properties of these benchmark rules are used to derive efficiency conditions...

This article examines the intellectual influences that economists exerted on Nicholas Georgescu Roegen in his formative and mature years. While these include Malthus, Marshall, Pareto and Schumpeter, attention is focused on Marx and Gossen. Karl Marx is the economist whom Georgescu Roegen cited...

This paper looks at the paradigm of the past two decades that goes under the name of "new trade theory" or "new international economics", and rejects the assumptions underlying mainstream trade theory such as constant returns to scale and perfect competition. Authors contributing to it include...

For exchange economies with classical economic preferences, it is shown that any strategy-proof social choice function that selects Pareto optimal outcomes cannot guarantee everyone a consumption bundle bounded away from the origin. This result demonstrates that there is a fundamental conflict...

It has been claimed that the deviations from purchasing power parity are highly persistent and have quite long half-lives under the assumption of a linear adjustment of real exchange rates. However, inspired by trade cost models, nonlinear adjustment has been widely employed in recent empirical...