We examine Africa's increasing reliance on hydropower in light of climate change induced variations in rainfall and the potential power outages that may result. We use a continent wide riverflow material model and IPPC climate change scenarios and show that current plans for African dam building...

The paper presents a model of housing and credit cycles featuring distorted beliefs and comovement and mutual reinforcement between house price expectations and price developments via credit expansion/contraction. Positive (negative) development in house price fuels optimism (pessimism) and...

In the Crawford-Sobel (uniform, quadratic utility) cheap-talk model, we consider a simple mediation scheme (a communication device) in which the informed agent reports one of the N possible elements of a partition to the mediator and then the mediator suggests one of the N actions to the...

This article introduces a U-statistic type process that is fashioned from a kernal which can depend on nuisance parameters. It is shown that this process can accommodate, in a straightforward manner, anti-symmetric kernels, which have proved useful for detecting changing patterns in the dynamics...

We conduct an extensive examination of profitability of technical analysis in ten emerging foreign exchange markets. Studying 25988 trading strategies for emerging foreign exchange markets, we find that best rules can sometimes generate an annually mean excess return of more than 30%. Based on...

Formal methods use computers to verify proofs or even discover new theorems. Interest in applying formal methods to problems in economics has increased in the past decade, but - to date - none of this work has been published in economics journals. This paper applies formal methods to a familiar...

We provide the first detailed econometric analysis of the impact of sentencing on various types of acquisitive crime (theft, burglary, fraud and robbery) in England and Wales. We examine (a) whether sentencing reduces crime and (b) whether short sentences are more effective than long sentences....

We consider a Battle of the Sexes game with incomplete information and allow cheap talk regarding players' private information before the game is played. We prove that the unique fully revealing symmetric cheap talk equilibrium has a desirable coordination property. Such coordination can also be...

In March 2014 China announced its long awaited plan for managing the migration of the rural population into already overcrowded urban areas. The so called "new style" of urbanization has potentially important implications for China's energy use although the relationship between urbanization and...

This paper develops an equilibrium model with a housing collateral constraint in which rational agents are uncertain about the collateral price process. Bayesian learning by agents can endogenously generate booms and busts in collateral prices and significantly strengthen the role of the...