Examples of repeated destructive behavior abound throughout the history of human societies. This paper examines the role of social memory --- a society's vicarious beliefs about the past --- in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts. We examine whether such behavior is consistent with...

This paper examines the mechanics of intertemporal information provision in dynastic governments. It has been suggested that "horizontal accountability," i.e., a system of governance where auditing functions lie outside the executive branch, can ensure credible disclosure of information. The...

This paper explores the extent to which the presence of ex-ante transaction costs may lead to failures of the Coase Theorem. In particular we identify and investigate the basic 'hold-up problem' which arises whenever the parties to a Coasian negotiation have to pay some ex-ante costs for the...

The no-surcharge rule (NSR) prohibits merchants from charging different prices to consumers that use credit cards instead of cash. We show that, while an NSR raises card company profits, it may reduce both cash and card transactions. If the card company can offer rebates to its cardholders, it...

New Neoclassical Synthesis models equate the instrument of monetary policy to the implied CCAPM rate arising from an Euler equation. This paper identifies monetary policy shocks within six of the G7 countries and examines the movement of money market and implied CCAPM rates. The key result is...

We analyze a model of directed search in which unemployed job seekers observe all posted wages. We allow for the possibility of multiple applications by workers and ex post competition among vacancies. For any number of applications, there is a unique symmetric equilibrium in which vacancies...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

Total pollution emitted by U.S. manufacturers declined over the past 30 years, while manufacturing output increased. This improvement must result from one of two trends: (1) change in production or abatement processes ("technology"); or (2) change in the mix of goods manufactured in the U.S,...

This paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution levels in cities world-wide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between national income and pollution. We test the sensitivity of the pollution-income...

Why are aggregate equity payouts and debt issued positively correlated over the business cycle in U.S. data? Standard real business cycle (RBC) models have few predictions about capital structure, because they assume that financial markets are frictionless. On the other hand, the tradeoff theory...