Bond issuers frequently immunize/hedge their interest rate exposure by means of interest rate swaps (IRS). The receiving leg matches all bond cash-flows, while the pay leg requires floating rate coupon payments of form LIBOR + a spread. The goal of hedging against interest rate risk is only...

This paper considers how monetary policy, a Federal funds rate shock, affects the dynamics of the US housing sector and whether the financial market liberalization of the early 1980s influenced those dynamics. The analysis uses impulse response functions obtained from a large-scale Bayesian...

Building on previously proposed methodology for an index of economic and social rights fulfillment, this paper presents country scores and rankings based on the Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment Index (ESRF Index). Unlike socio-economic indicators, which are often used as proxies for the...

Attorney advertising routinely targets tort victims. In this paper, a theoretical model is developed which incorporates advertising intensity, litigation costs, and an endogenous number of lawsuits. Since advertising induces victims to bring suit, it increases the level of injurer care. However,...

In this paper we offer a simple exposition of the neoclassical production theoretic foundations of Data Envelopment Analysis. The concepts of technical efficiency (both input- and output-oriented), scale efficiency, and cost efficiency are explained and the corresponding DEA models are described...

The paper studies the dynamic nature of optimal solutions under commitment in Barro-Gordon and new-Keynesian models and, finds two interesting parameters -- the implied targets and the persistence parameter that governs the adjustment toward the implied targets. The implied targets generally...

A rule for three-way division of profits based on peer evaluation reports is impartial if the calculation of each partner’s share ignores her report, and is consensual if it respects evaluations when the three partners’ reports are in agreement. We give an approximate solution to the problem...

We study the channels of interstate risk sharing in Germany for the time period 1970 to 2006, estimating the degrees of smoothing of a shock to a state's gross domestic product by factor markets, the government sector, and credit markets, respectively. Within the government sector, we pay...

This paper studies the inefficiency of one-to-one matching markets as measured by the price of stability. We begin by providing some theoretical upper bounds on this type of inefficiency, bounds that vary with the composition of participants’ ordinal preference lists. We then turn to...

As a measure of overall technical inefficiency the Directional Distance Function (DDF) introduced by Chambers, Chung, and Färe ties the potential output expansion and input contraction together through a single parameter. By duality, the DDF is related to a measure of profit inefficiency, which...