Modern-day piracy on the high seas once again poses a serious threat to international shipping. This paper develops an economic of model of piracy that emphasizes the strategic interaction between pirates (offenders) and shippers (victims), a factor not previously studied in the law enforcement...

Over more than six decades following Independence, industry in West Bengal has steadily gone downhill. Usually the Left Front government effectively controlled by the Marxist Communist Party (CPM), that has ruled the state for the past 34 years until its recent defeat in the state assembly...

Article 100 of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea requires signatories to “cooperate” against maritime piracy, but “cooperate” is undefined. Enforcement is a public good – creating uncompensated benefits for others, so suffering from free-rider problems. Our analysis readily...

We use several models using Bayesian and classical methods to forecast employment for eight sectors of the US economy. In addition to standard vector-autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, we also include the information content of 143 additional monthly series in some models....

In the present study we evaluate the overall cost efficiency of a network of branches of a single large public sector bank in India within the city of Calcutta using the data for the year 2002. Our objective is to determine the optimal number of branches within a postal district that could...

In production economics, little attention is paid to transportation costs in any discussion of cost minimization by the firm. When the output is produced at multiple locations, transportation costs can become quite important in light of the geographical dispersion of plants and markets. In...

This paper studies the effects of health shocks on the demand for health insurance and annuities, along with precautionary saving in a dynamic life-cycle model. I argue that when the health shock can simultaneously increase health expenses and reduce longevity, rational agents would neither...

This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in history – the scattering of plots in the open fields in the Middle Ages and the transition to the factory system in the Industrial Revolution – to shed light on the uses of institutional economics in economic history. In both of these...

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of asset price bubbles and crashes in an overlapping generations economy. The model highlights the effects of asset price fluctuations on labor supply decisions, and demonstrates how labor market adjustment can help propagate the effects of these...

We examine project selection decisions of …rms constrained in the number of projects they can handle at once. Taking on a project requires a commitment of uncertain duration, restricting the …rm from selecting another project in subsequent periods. Due to the capacity constraints and need for...