This paper studies a simple OLG model with production under the assumption that capital investment is completely irreversible: installed capital cannot be transformed back into consumption good nor transferred from one firm to another. Since firms cannot be dismantled at each generational change...

This contribution to a Festschrift for Warren Samuels argues that in giving policy advice economists should seek diversification and consider the probability of error, and also the loss function and risk aversion. And since advocacy of a theory is in a relevant way like a policy decision, the...

This paper reviews and appraises the debate about whether the central bank should pursue counter-cyclical policy or generate a stable monetary growth rate. It focuses on whether the participants have followed the rules of "good conversation," and concludes that they have not. Monetarist have...

An in-kind subsidy is equivalent, both theoretically and empirically, to an increase of income for an individual consumer. But the equivalence does not empirically carry over to in-kind grants by a central government to a local one: this has been seen as an anomaly and dubbed the “flypaper...

The principle that theories should be tested by the accuracy of their predictions but not by the realism of their assumptions needs to be qualified. As a practical matter we often need to evaluate the applicability of theories to cases for which they have not been tested by their predictions....

We propose an economic model of business groups that allows for the cooperative behavior of groups of firms, where the number and size of each group is determined endogenously. In this framework, more than one configuration of groups that can arise in equilibrium: several different types of...

We consider interactive epistemic models where individuals are described by both their "knowledge" and their "beliefs." Three intersubjective consistency conditions are examined: Intersubjective Caution (if an individual believes something to be common belief then he knows it to be common...