Food Stamps represent nearly $11 billion of personal income in the United States. The coupons that are issued to represent the purchasing power available to recipients are also reserves for the commercial banking system.This study asks how closely these coupons are substitutable for what is...

This paper compares the dynamics of two general equilibrium models of endogenous growth in which agents have comparison utility.' In the inward-looking' economy, individuals care about how their consumption in the current period compares to their own consumption in the past (one way to describe...

Both young and old consumers appear to dissave too little for their behaviour to be consistent with a strict life cycle model. We concentrate on young households and document their behaviour drawing from Italian and Japanese data. We also provide a theoretical set-up which can account for the...

We determine empirically how the Big Three automakers accommodate shocks to demand. They have the capability to change prices, alter labor inputs through temporary layoffs and overtime, or adjust inventories. These adjustments are interrelated, non-convex, and dynamic in nature. Combining weekly...

This paper uses simple time series techniques to analyze changes in the short-run behavior of 38 physical production series for 1889-1984. The main finding is that fluctuations in these output series in the periods 1889-1914 and 1947-1984 are very similar, while those in the period 1922- 1939...

This paper uses the Blanchard (1985) finite horizon model to study how taxes and government spending can be managed to stabilize aggregate demand. It is shown that tax policy cannot stabilize demand in less time than it stabilizes the public debt, but that, if government spending is the...

This paper examines common arrangements for separating control from cash flow rights: stock pyramids, cross-ownership structures, and dual class equity structures. We describe the ways in which such arrangements enable a controlling shareholder or group to maintain a complete lock on the control...

This paper offers some observations on employee crime, economic theories of crime, limits on bonding, and the efficiency wage hypothesis. We demonstrate that the simplest economic theories of crime predict that profit-maximizing firms should follow strategies of minimal monitoring and large...

This paper is an empirical study of the Banco de Mexico's monetary policy during the 1970s. In particular, it studies the Mexican monetary equilibria and the extent to which capital mobility undermined monetary control. Estimates of a Banco de Mexico reaction function suggest that the Mexican...

In the late 1970s, many economists argued that the deleterious effects of inflation on the user cost of capital for U.S. firms were large. Since that time, the tax code has changed, the level of inflation has dropped significantly, and the of investment has evolved considerably. In this paper,...