This paper shows that for five small commodity-exporting countries that have adopted inflation targeting monetary policies, world commodity price aggregates have predictive power for their CPI and PPI inflation, particularly once possible structural breaks are taken into account. This conclusion...

The literature on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) determinants is remarkably diverse in terms of competing theories and empirical results. We utilize Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to resolve the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing FDI theories. Since the structure of...

We examine the impact of a stylized pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) Social Security program in an economy of overlapping generations with equilibrium growth. We adopt realistic mortality and other demographic assumptions and allow for the presence or absence of full life annuities. In all cases we find...

Count models often best describe the nature of data in health economics, but the presence of fixed effects with excess zeros and overdispersion strictly limits the choice of estimation methods. This paper presents a quasi-conditional likelihood method to consistently estimate models with excess...

This paper takes a new approach to testing whether employer learning is public or private. We show that public and private learning schemes make two distinct predictions about the curvature of wage growth paths when there is a job change, because the amount of information transferred to a new...

This paper analyzes a small open economy Ramsey growth model with convex investment costs and a collateral constraint on borrowing. Optimal control methods are used to characterize the dynamics of investment, consumption, and debt. The analysis demonstrates that the economy’s adjustment speed...

The study of bank interest rate spreads is central to our understanding of the process of financial intermediation. Data limitations generally restrict empirical analyses to interest rate spreads that are constructed from bank income statements and balance sheets. In this paper we make use of a...