Economic theory says the average income of different regions should grow closer over time. Within the United States and across some of the richer countries, evidence suggests this is true.

Evolutionary programming is a stochastic optimization procedure that has proved useful in optimizing difficult functions. This paper shows that evolutionary programming can be used to solve the Bellman equation problem with a high degree of accuracy and substantially less CPU time than Bellman...

Revised. This paper investigates the role of beliefs over monetary policy in propagating the effects of monetary policy shocks within the context of a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model. In this model, monetary policy periodically switches between low- and high-money-growth regimes....

The current wage at a job may not fully reflect the "value" of that job. For example, a job with a low starting wage may be preferred to one with a high starting wage if the growth rate of wages is higher in the former than in the latter. In fact, differences in wage growth can potentially...