A panel study reveals that an increase in pretax income equality leads to sudstantially lower retail prices. Prices also fall if the income tax on high income families is raised. One explanation is that equality makes consumer demand more elastic. This would imply that progressive taxation helps...

In dynamic models with multiple equilibria, a central question is how agents coordinate their expectations on a particular outcome. Many dynamic models feature endogenous flexibility: at some cost, agents can adjust their behavior more quickly (e.g., in response to changing market conditions)....

A popular theory of business cycles is that they are driven by animal spirits: shifts in expectations brought on by sunspots. Two prominent examples are Diamond (JPE, 1982) and Howitt and McAfee (AER, 1992). We show that these models have unique equilibria if there are payoff shocks of any size....

We study environments where a production process is jointly shared by a finite group of agents. The social decision involves the determination of input contribution and output distribution. We define a competitive solution when there is decreasing returns-to-scale and show that it leads to a...

This paper evaluates the sources of transitory market power in the market for personal computer (PCs) during the late 1980s. Our analysis is motivated by the coexistence of low barriers to entry into the PC industry and high rates of innovative investment by a small number of PC manufacturers.

If we express our knowledge in sentences, we will find that these sentences to some extent are linked by logical rules. We ask whether the structure logic imposes on our knowledge restricts what we forget and what we remember. The model is a two period S5-style modal logic. In this logic we...