This paper introduces a new empirical strategy for the characterization of business cycles. It combines non-parametric decoding methods that classify a series into expansions and recessions but does not require specification of the underlying stochastic process generating the data. It then uses...

To appear in the Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization

To appear in the Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization

I consider a model of directed search in which strategic sellers advertise general trading mechanisms. A mechanism determines the number of buyers that will get served and the side payments as a function of ex post realized demand. After observing these advertisements buyers simultaneously visit...

We observe that a symmetric two-player zero-sum game has a pure strategy equilibrium if and only if it is not a generalized rock-paper-scissors matrix. Moreover, we show that every finite symmetric quasiconcave two-player zero-sum game has a pure equilibrium. Further sufficient conditions for...

We develop awareness-dependent subjective expected utility by taking unawareness structures introduced in Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper (2006, 2008, 2011a) as primitives in the Anscombe-Aumann approach to subjective expected utility. We observe that a decision maker is unaware of an event if and...

This paper reviews and appraises the debate about whether the central bank should pursue counter-cyclical policy or generate a stable monetary growth rate. It focuses on whether the participants have followed the rules of "good conversation," and concludes that they have not. Monetarist have...

An in-kind subsidy is equivalent, both theoretically and empirically, to an increase of income for an individual consumer. But the equivalence does not empirically carry over to in-kind grants by a central government to a local one: this has been seen as an anomaly and dubbed the “flypaper...