Monetary integration involves a consideration of two quite different types or dimensions of sovereignty.One is policy sovereignty, and the other is legal sovereignty. Policy sovereignty refers to the ability to conduct policy independent of commitments to other countries. Legal sovereignty...

We consider the design and implementation of international trade agreements when: (i) negotiations are undertaken and commitments made in the presence of uncertainty about future political pressures; (ii) governments possess private information about political pressures at the time that the...

The provision of public goods by voluntary contributions alone is feasiblebut the outcome is suboptimal. This paper examines the potential for gove rnment supplementation of the voluntary contribution system in order to retain the basic features but improve the outcome. It is shown that...

In this paper we employ the Kullback Information apparatus in (a) obtaining the strong consistency of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator in the standard version of the general linear structural econometric model (GLSEM); (b) deriving very succintly the necessary and sufficient (nas)...

We study countries choosing armament levels and then whether or not to go to war. We show that if the costs of war are not overly high or low, then all equilibria must involve "dove," "hawk," and "deterrent" strategies and the probability of war is positive (but less than one) in any given...

The paper shows that in the presence of network externalities, consumers adopt conventional technologies too early; the waiting option for a newly emerging technology is not exercised enough.

Rural households in many developing economies have incomes that vary seasonally. We explore the implications of this income seasonality for household consumption. We use household-level data from three Indian villages to document seasonal patterns in income and consumption, and to test whether...

The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a political gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic party. We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer. Data for the United States support this...

This paper deals with the problem of testing for the presence of autocorrelation in a system of general linear models (Seemingly Unrelated Regressions, SUR) when the model is formulated as a vector autoregression (VAR) with exogenous variables. The solution presented in this paper is a...